I used to be in an outdated bookshop in Dublin, of all locations, escaping the chilly and leafing by a ebook known as The Foraged Residence, after I stopped on a diffusion of an outdated schoolhouse in Germany and was immediately entranced. I hurried again to my lodge room to do some Google reconnaissance and found extra to the story:
Tucked within the Mecklenburg countryside, close to the agricultural village of Rensow, the Schoolhouse and a close-by Manor Home are the mission of Danish/German couple Christina and Knut. The couple was residing in Copenhagen, the place Christina is from, earlier than discovering the late Seventeenth-century Manor Home (“nearly ruinous,” Christina says) in 2002. “The primary years we got here right here for the weekends,” she says. “We labored on the home, rooms, partitions…”, peeling away layers to disclose patinated partitions and including antiques. The couple was well-suited to the duty: Christina has a background in vogue (throughout stints at Harrod’s and Harvey Nichols in London, Princess Diana was one in every of her shoppers), and Knut grew up apprenticing to his father’s antiques commerce, driving by the German countryside to supply pottery and antiques from outdated farmhouses.
The couple revived the home and saved it from destroy; then, slowly, after a job relocation and the beginning of their daughter, then their son, spent an increasing number of time in the home, earlier than settling in full-time with their household. “We determined to strive the nation life—we might at all times return if it didn’t work out,” Christina says. “Now [that was] 9 years in the past, and no signal that we’ll transfer again any time quickly.”
They stay within the Manor Home, actually an outdated farmhouse—and lease out, for trip lets, rooms within the Manor Home in addition to the Schoolhouse within the close by village, which they’ve additionally redone, all below the identify Gutshaus Rensow.
Right here’s a glance (and plenty of causes to make a pilgrimage to Rensow).
Images by way of Gutshaus Rensow.
The Manor Home
Based on the guesthouse web site, “the home is surrounded by a former English, however now slightly wild, park, with centuries-old timber, shy deers, colourful peacocks, music frogs, a singing nightingale known as right here sprosser, and curious foxes.”
