What Years of Farmhouse Hospitality Taught Me About What Actually Matters to Guests

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Crossroads Conversations

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

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For the first year or two of hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats, I worried about the wrong things.

I fretted over the towels. I agonised slightly over whether the guest rooms felt “smart” enough, whether the breakfast presentation looked sufficiently considered, whether I measured up to the polished retreat centres with their infinity pools and their perfectly folded linens. I was, in short, trying to compete in a game I were never going to win — and, as it turns out, never needed to.

I worked this out properly the morning a guest came to brunch, phone already half-raised for a photo of the coffee, and instead found Loki standing just outside the kitchen door, watching her with the mild, unbothered judgment only a Falabella can manage. She forgot about the coffee entirely.

What Guests Actually Talk About Afterwards

I’ve hosted enough retreats now to notice a pattern in what people mention when they write to me weeks or months later. It’s never the linens. Nobody has ever emailed to tell me the thread count moved them. What they mention, almost without fail, is Loki wandering over for a cuddle. Or Angelito’s particular disdain for being photographed – from his non-photogenic side. Or the morning Bianca and Valentino got into some minor dispute in the paddock that briefly upstaged everyone’s croissants.

They remember the farmhouse itself, too — but not for its polish. For its slight imperfections, if I’m honest. The uneven floor of the terrace. The kettle that takes a moment longer than you’d expect. These aren’t flaws I’ve fixed, and increasingly I don’t intend to. A hotel is designed to disappear into competence. A farmhouse, done properly, is designed to feel like somewhere specific — where a personality, an occasionally opinionated one, wanders around outside the kitchen window.

Polish Reassures. Character Connects.

I think what I’ve come to understand is that hotel polish does a very particular job: it reassures you that nothing will go wrong. That’s valuable, certainly, and I don’t begrudge anyone who wants it. But reassurance isn’t the same as connection, and a retreat, at its best, is entirely in the business of connection.

A perfectly pressed duvet doesn’t ask anything of a guest. A small, occasionally chaotic herd of miniature horses wandering past does, in its own quiet way — it invites you to notice something, to soften slightly, to put your phone down for reasons that have nothing to do with a scenic view. I can’t manufacture that kind of moment with better housekeeping. I can only make room for it and get out of the way.

The Charity Behind the Horses

There’s a practical thread running under all of this too, one I don’t always lead with but probably should: the horses guests fall for over dinner aren’t simply farmhouse décor. Loki, Angelito, Zofía, Estrella, Bianca, and Valentino are part of a rescue herd, and their care is supported through Sauvetage et Sérénité. So when a guest lingers at the fence a little longer than planned, or asks — as they almost always do — how they can help, that moment of unpolished, unplanned affection is doing quiet good well beyond the retreat itself.

What I’d Tell Anyone Creating a Retreat

If you’re weighing up whether to chase polish or lean into character, my honest advice, hard-won, is this: stop trying to out-hotel the hotels. Nobody comes to a farmhouse in Gascony for flawlessness. They come, whether they’d put it this way or not, for the specific, slightly imperfect, entirely authentic feeling of somewhere real — and for the small determined horse who’s decided breakfast is also, unofficially, his.

If you’d like to meet the herd for yourself, and see what a retreat at Maison Meraki actually looks like, I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com — I’ll tell you honestly what to expect, horses included.