Our Journey at The Smugglers Rest, Mortehoe

Our dream to start a beautiful boutique B&B in North Devon.

Stacey and I have always had a love for catering so when we met and fell in love it felt like a very natural step to start our own bed and breakfast. My first viewing of “the smugglers” was alone as Stacey was working on a superyacht in the Caribbean at the time. It was love at first site, I was blind to the peeling wall paper, leaky roof and old carpets, I only saw her potential, her location and the beautiful village of Mortehoe. When I dragged Stacey along a few weeks later she was convinced as well, I don’t think I even needed to beg, maybe a little!

A few months later (April 2016) we were the proud owners of the old girl and we immediately began work on our vision of a boutique bed and breakfast with a café on the ground floor. Those first six weeks were the most intense of our lives we worked 14 hour days 7 days a week to get the café finished, in the end the scaffold came down the day before our first guests arrived! We were still painting the cafe when they arrived I vividly remember them asking if we would be ready for breakfast in the morning!