About Us

If you are going to rent a vacation house or apartment in Europe from us, and entrust us with not only your money, but also with having the expertise to start you out on what you dream will be an extremely pleasurable experience, it is only fair that you would want to know who we are. It is our hope that this brief sketch of our history and our “mission”, to use a much abused term, will be of help.

We began renting vacation properties in Europe 28 years ago, which makes us one of the old-timers in this business. How we started in this venture is an interesting story, because it tells how we became totally addicted to this way of traveling, particularly for families.

At the time, in the early 1980s, I, Carl Stewart, was a partner in a boutique law firm in New York City (there were no boutique firms at the time---then they were simply called “small” to distinguish them from medium and large firms.) Recently divorced, with two teenage daughters, I realized that the demands of my law practice meant that I was watching, from a distance, as their childhood passed me by and I decided that we needed to spend some quality time together---to use another much-abused phrase! What better to do than to take them on a European adventure?

But then thoughts went to our accommodations; would we take two adjoining hotel rooms, which certainly would have been appropriate for a dad and his teenage daughters? Hardly the way to spend quality time, I thought, so I came up with the idea of renting places for a week or so.

Shortly after beginning my search, I found that there were virtually no sources for this kind of vacation here in the United States, but I was already an inveterate traveler and I remembered being fascinated by the seemingly endless list of rental places found in the classified ad section of the Sunday London Times. In New York City, where I was living at the time, there was a mecca for people seeking a foreign newspaper or magazine; this place was Hotaling's, located in the most disreputable section of Times Square, now transformed into a mini-Disneyland and sanitized beyond all recognition.

Having purchased the necessary newspapers, I then set out writing, phoning, faxing---no e-mail back then---people offering their houses and apartments for short-term rental. Soon enough, I had found us an apartment in Chelsea in London, a big old farmhouse---far larger than we needed---on a working farm in northern Yorkshire, and a decrepit ancient house in a tiny hamlet in the Dordogne in southwest France.

(Of course, the decrepitude of the house was not one of the points mentioned by the advertiser!)

The trip was a revelation, in many ways, and my daughters, now grown, with families of their own, can still remember the most minute details of our trip. It was an extremely hot July in France that year and almost every day we went to the community swimming pool in the afternoon, followed by a stop at a roadside joint, not unlike many similar places in this country, which was most notable for its wonderful ice cream concoctions, presided over by a very large swarm of stinging insects. My daughter Rachel can to this day tell you the order in which the various ingredients of the peche melba were layered.

It was the best four weeks of my life to then and while we were sitting at London Heathrow, waiting for an engine replacement to arrive for our 747 headed back to New York, I had some time to think about the practice of law and the tolls it was taking on me and the possibility that this foreign rental venture was not only great fun but also a possible business. And so I slowly, but determinedly, made the career change and have never looked back with an ounce of regret. It was and continues to be not only great fun, but it has offered me the opportunity to continue to indulge my passion for travel.

Fast forward nearly 30 years to the present and who we now are: Well, not all that much different from what we did back then but larger by quite a bit, wiser by a little, and still enjoying every minute of it. We began with about 25 houses in France, a few less in Italy, and perhaps 50 in England, Scotland and Wales. Experience tends to be a help in sorting the wheat from the chaff and also allows one to refine one’s taste; I still love traveling in Britain, but I discovered that my true loves were Italy and France. Thus today, most of our rental properties are in those two countries but now we have many hundreds of places rather than a few dozen.

Our philosophy hasn’t changed much however; we insist on visiting places, knowing that photographs can, at their best, show only so much, and at worst, hide flaws that you as the renter have a right to know about. I also believed that we could not rent a place to someone based on their viewing a catalogue, or as is almost always the case today, a Web site. Our clients need to speak to someone in our office so that we know what you want and can, to the extent that it is ever truly possible, match you and your traveling companions to the rental property.

So there, in a nutshell, is our philosophy of running this business; slow is better than fast; a telephone call is better than the click of a mouse; the “right” place for you can not be solely determined from pretty photos and descriptions filled with enticing adjectives. Come and explore the possibilities with us.

Carl Stewart
Great Barrington, Massachusetts