Making a booking
When you find a house you like, you can make a booking by clicking on the “Select your dates” button on the right, under the pricing. On the next page you can select your dates by clicking on the dates you want - the website will then show you the price. By selecting the currency symbol you can see the price in one of our three guaranteed currencies. Whichever currency you choose, we guarantee your price will stay the same, so you do not have to worry about currency fluctuations. To proceed, click on “Reserve this property” and you will be asked to provide your details. Submitting your details will request the property, and reserve it for you at no cost for the next 48 hours. During that time, we also double-check with the owner that the house is available - most of our properties are exclusive, but some are not and also, by their very nature, many of the properties are privately owned and used by the owners. We will also contact you and make sure the house suits your needs and answer any queries you may have.
When the property is confirmed you will receive an email with login and payment details. Your login, by default, is simply your email plus your booking reference, so there are no tricky passwords to set. By logging in you can check the details of your booking, add numbers in your party, arrival details and bed make-up and, crucially, pay for your deposit - 30% - and then your balance, due 10 weeks before your arrival date. You will receive automatic reminders at every stage and we will also track your bookings progress.
The Wrightson family were part of the wave of self-sufficient hippies who moved out to the countryside in the 70s. We moved to Tuscany, to a derelict farmhouse in 1973; there was no running water, no electricity, no telephone or TV and no heating save for an open, smoky fireplace. When the house was partly fixed, and had a calor gas fridge and oil lamps, by 1978, we rented it to Laurie Taylor and Tom Baker for a month while we moved out and came back to the UK to visit family. That started a process of renting to UK visitors, first just our own flat and then helping others do the same. Here’s a BBC article about our move to Tuscany:
We generally consider 1982 to be the year things got serious, even though early bookings were still done by walking over a mile to the nearby village where they had a telephone, so everything took a lot longer! In the early 90s an article in Independent called us one of the “longest established and best respected agencies” - we like to think this is still true. We certainly value transparency and honesty as driving values and like to think this is why we have so many return customers, some for over 20 years.We have now been helping people visit Tuscany for over 35 years and have also started renting properties in Provence and the Italian Lakes, mainly because these are 2 places we also love and often visit.
We have been known for years for our brochures. I have been drawing and painting the houses we rent as well as some of the villages and towns. It started as a way to print a brochure in black and white in the 80s - my sister and I were drafted in by my mother to provide illustrations of the houses instead of photographs, which were trickier to print well. Since then it has become our way of making the brochures, and I like it as sitting down to paint a house is also a way to closely observe it for an hour or three.
I continue to illustrate the houses and the areas even though printed brochures seem to be fading out of existence, which is a great pity. We are always thinking of ways to use the drawings and recently have started sending out your directions and vouchers in travel folder with the illustrations - we hope you like them!
