Wren Place Hall

Wren place was a gorgeous home, the pictures don't do it justice.

We had an excellent stay here and would highly recommend to any big groups!

Sykes customer service is atrocious.

Forced to use Whatsapp, promised a response withing 48 hours, heard nothing from several messages I posted. Had to google a tel no as none available on your site. Made several calls as no response to my early check in request. Ended up asking the host directly. Awful experience and will never, nor recommend anyone else, to book with you again. Use a different platform which knows how to put the service iinto customer service, as Sykes clearly don't care.

Beautifully conceived, poorly implemented, and terribly managed.

Our extended family of 9 adults and 7 children - booked this property for a reunion. On arrival, we couldn’t get access at the specified time of 5pm. The house not been cleaned so the owner and his daughter attended to clean this large 8 bedroom house. Not surprisingly, just making the beds took until around 9pm, which was a real challenge with young children in tow. The rest of the house only got a cursory clean: dusty surfaces, greasy appliances, and rubbish strewn across the gardens all remained. We didn’t receive the welcome email explaining how the property and its facilities actually work until day 2 of our stay. The house is beautiful on the surface, but a few days of actually living in it reveals it isn’t ready to be rented out. New furniture still had its packaging and instructions (along with dust) in the drawers. Bathrooms were missing basics like bath mats, and the toilet seats were ill-fitting and wobbly — smaller than the porcelain they sat on, as if the wrong ones had been ordered. None of the bathrooms had locks on the doors, including shared bathrooms and the ground-floor loo. One bedroom had two bedside lamps with no bulbs — an issue already flagged in a review a month earlier, and one we raised directly with the owner ourselves, yet it still wasn’t fixed for the whole of our stay. We were also warned not to use the top-floor shower as it ran too hot — again, already flagged in that same month-old review and still unaddressed. More seriously, every hot tap in the house runs scalding hot (69 deg C measured in kitchen) — genuinely dangerous for children — and given this was a recent renovation, it’s inexcusable that no thermostatic mixing valves were fitted to regulate it. There was also loose cabling (not mains fortunately) hanging from a wall, and a power cable sticking up out of the ground next to the front lawn — wrapped in tape, but still. Cooking is central to a family gathering, and here too the basics were missing: too few knives (we had to go out and buy a kitchen knife set), no oven gloves, no tea towels, no peeler, no grater, no butter dish, and more. It was genuinely infuriating to spend our first few days chasing the owner and shopping for essentials instead of enjoying the experience. At one stage he said he was “too busy” and suggested we should have sympathy for him because he lives and has a job in Greater Manchester so his self-catering clients are plainly not his priority. The “games” room and “bar” are in the cellar, which is very damp. The bar stools are all rusted, to the point that sitting on one would stain your clothes. Outside, the rear gardens are poorly maintained — overgrown weeds and unkempt ornamental hedging throughout. The owner was initially responsive and apologetic about the state of the house, travelling out with his daughter on our arrival evening to try to sort things out. But the effort was chaotic and poorly directed — we suggested he bring in cleaners the next day and focus only on the bedrooms, but he was determined to handle everything himself. He was clearly stressed, but that’s not how you manage a large property for a group of 17 paying a substantial sum for the week. The hot tubs were a separate, ongoing problem throughout — not fit to use, with every chemical reading outside the safe range, and the water foaming up as soon as the jets were switched on, a clear sign of how dirty it was. When we raised the idea that the hot tub water should be changed between guests, he dismissed it outright. When we followed up directly about the readings, his response was a terse text saying he was busy for the next two days, that the hot tub was fine to use — despite the pH and alkalinity readings being well outside the safe range on the provided test strips — and that we were welcome to try dosing the chemicals ourselves. We declined. The gardener who came the following day was competent and got the readings into a safe range, but by the next morning the chlorine level had dropped too low again. Chlorine is known to deplete quickly when it reacts with body oils, lotions, and other organic residue — a well-documented issue in hot tubs, which have a small water volume and see heavy use relative to a pool. Given how dirty the water clearly was, and how quickly it kept sliding back out of range, we suspected it needed changing rather than just re-dosing — a step the owner had already dismissed as unnecessary when we first raised it. In the end, we decided the hot tubs simply couldn’t be trusted and abandoned any hope of using them - our children were very disappointed. Beyond that, there were several serious safety lapses. On arrival, the door to a supposedly closed section of the garden was wide open — an area littered with rubbish and broken glass, leading to an unfenced pond at the end of the path, a real drowning risk for a young child. Had our children wandered in before we spotted it, someone could easily have been seriously hurt. Separately — and credit to the owner for flagging this himself on the Monday evening — the door to the roof had been left unlocked, directly accessible from the children’s floor. The roof is still a building site with sheer drops on either side. The stairs down from the children’s floor are narrow and steep, yet have no bannisters at all — another basic safety issue that has no place in a house marketed for family groups. On top of all this, the name the owner uses for the house isn’t its actual registered name. A food delivery couldn’t find us and was sent to the wrong address entirely, meaning we had to drive out to collect it from a neighbour who was, luckily, kind enough to take it in. Individually these are small things, but thoughtlessly handled together, they created real, ongoing inconvenience and anxiety throughout our stay. This could be a wonderful house. As currently managed, it isn’t a safe or workable rental — and the fact that basic issues flagged over a month ago still hadn’t been addressed suggests this isn’t a one-off bad week, but business as usual. We are now gathering and collating evidence pursuing the various issues further - caveat emptor!