Issue 57

PEOPLE
riends and business partners Michael Fenna, a DJ and
music producer, and Charlie Bonham Christie, a bar
and restaurant entrepreneur, met in Peckham through
their dogs.
“We found ourselves travelling into London at weird
times of the night and became friends,” says Michael.
“We’d known each other for a couple of years when we
were sitting in a trendy little ale house and I mentioned I
had an idea for a venue project. It turned out Charlie had
been thinking along the same lines and his family had
some land that could be perfect for it.
“That was August 2015 and I found myself heading off to Somerset
to Marston Park, half expecting a field out the back of someone’s
house, but as it turned out there was this beautiful lake surrounded by
beautiful woodland.
“For the next year we spent the time getting different people down
to the site to get a feel of what the potential was, what could be a
problem, what could fit nicely with the ecology and to just understand
it. After 12 months of friendly conversations and strolls we decided
to go for it, set up a company and started to take things a little more
seriously.”
From 2016 the duo started on a few years of pre app discussions
and planning permission which is still an on-going journey. “We have
long term hopes of restoring some of the ruined listed buildings on
the estate and to save the historic landscape,” says Michael. “It’s a
Victorian designed landscape and important both historically and for
the biodiversity that lives here. The ancient woodland needs a lot of
work as it is 80% ash and, with ash dieback, most of it will have fallen
over in the next five to 10 years. The 25 acre lake is also severely silted
up – five acres have already been lost and it is prone to bad algae
blooms.”
With a focus on undertaking the landscape restoration, Michael and
Charlie believed that a small scale, sensitively operated hospitality
business was the way to go.
“We got started in August 2020 with a small ‘experiment’. We were
operating under a different name and set up 10 fully furnished bell
tents, 10 unfurnished tents and 10 bring your own tent pitches.
To begin with we ran the site under the 28 day tented rights rule,
which was then extended to 56 days. We had a very small bar café
in a horsebox, some decks, speakers and a stretch tent we used as a
communal space. We had different pop-up chefs coming through and
experimented with yoga classes and pottery things – trying different
bits to see what worked.”
The headline was that everyone wanted to book the fully furnished
tents! “People only took the unfurnished ones if there were none left.
The pitches didn’t work well for us – people would bring their own
food and drink, leave a lot of rubbish and not really engage with the
other things we had going on.
“Roughly speaking we charged double for a furnished tent than an
unfurnished one, and half again for a tent pitch. This was roughly in
line with what others were doing around the country. It was a time
where a lot of people were in similar boats, having been involved
in festivals and that sort of thing, and were now setting up similar
businesses around the UK.
“We also learned a lot about the layout of the site. We originally had
our communal spaces on the north east side of the lake which meant
you had south facing views and sun on your face, but it also meant you
got the prevailing south westerly wind which sucked the temperature
out of you. The tents were in a wooded area which meant lots of sticks
and leaves falling on them the whole time which wasn’t ideal either.”
The business began properly in May 2021 when it opened with 30
fully furnished tents. Michael and Charlie also teamed up with the
owner of one of the remaining Futuro Houses, an icon from the 1960s
designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen.
“It’s still the coolest thing I have seen in my whole life,” says Michael.
14 WWW.OPENAIRBUSINESS.COM