I rent out my Georgian townhouse as a hen venue. Here’s what happens

On Fridays, Charlotte Hughes can be found wandering the 20 rooms of her 5,800 sq ft Georgian townhouse in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to ensure it is picture-perfect.
The chandeliers are dusted, vases of hydrangeas are placed in front of the marble fireplaces and the grand cantilever stone staircase is swept — along with the servants’ staircase concealed behind the drawing room wall. Hughes, 52, then moves out to a small cottage with her husband and two sons, Hugo and Jasper, and invites 20 women into her home for a massive hen do.
If she sounds rather cavalier with her family home, Hughes insists that today’s hens are the most civilised guests of them all, even above families.
“We will sometimes get back after 20 hens have been here and there will only be four bottles of prosecco in the glass recycling bin. The girls coming in this weekend are doing ‘sip and paint’ on Friday night, where they drink wine and paint a bowl of fruit. It’s quite twee. On Saturday morning, they are doing a Parkrun. We organise activities like yoga, Pilates and crafting.”
The house does not host strippers, DJs, live music or nude butlers, the website makes clear. A weekend stay costs £2,000 to £4,000 for between 16 and 21 guests, depending on the season.
Hughes welcomes bridal parties most weekends to help to pay for the upkeep of her manor house, which she bought in 2003 after moving from Islington, north London. In recent years, she has turned it into the ultimate luxury hen getaway, including an indoor hot tub and spa treatment room in the former wine cellar, with its original barrelled ceiling. She arranges everything from life drawing and perfume blending to vineyard tours and private chefs for the hens.
Fortunately for Hughes, she is no stranger to throwing elaborate parties. Her husband, Darren, 57, is one of the founders of Cream, the famous 1990s house music night that was based in the now-defunct Nation nightclub in Liverpool. As a textiles designer, Hughes herself was tasked with designing the decor for the club and Creamfields festival, as well as the merchandise, including clothing.
In 2003 the family decided to relocate to Huddersfield, where Hughes grew up, to raise their children. They fell in love with the four-storey Norfolk House — originally built in 1866 and called New North House. The family sold their slim, four-storey Georgian London townhouse for £795,000 and bought the sandstone former vicarage for £575,000. “Our Islington house would probably be worth £5 million now,” Hughes says with a twinge of regret.
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For many years, they spent their summers in Ibiza running We Love Sundays, an event at Space nightclub, which funded their life as “lord and lady” of the manor. However, in 2016, they found themselves in financial difficulties when the club night ended.
“We didn’t have any money coming in and we still had to pay the bills,” Hughes says. “We had the kids in private school. We went from having a huge income to basically zero. We realised this house had to go. It’s absolutely huge and there were only four people living in it. It was a luxury.”
Selling the house was not straightforward, though.
“We’re on a main road, and because we don’t have a large garden and we’re not in a great school catchment area, we couldn’t find a buyer. Even though we kept dropping the price, it still didn’t sell,” she says.
Curiously, they attracted the attention of a Walter Mitty type who purported to be a Greek millionaire. He had sold his Chelsea home and was now living on a barge. They believed he was going to buy the house, until the police contacted them to see if they had any CCTV of the man, who they were told was a fantasist. “We had even had him round to the house for dinner,” she says.
After that, Hughes considered selling the house in a raffle. “The bills kept rolling in,” she says. “It was a really stressful time.” The family realised that while it might not be desirable to buyers, theirs was the perfect party house.
In lieu of large grounds, the house had a huge roof terrace, perfect for dancing the night away. Plus, it was only half a mile to Huddersfield railway station, with direct trains to cities including Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and York.
On the suggestion of a friend, they decided to rent it out over the Christmas holidays in 2016 while they stayed with Hughes’s mother nearby. They earned £3,000 over five days and realised it was their best chance to keep the house.
Covered by business insurance during Covid, they used the lockdown period to renovate it, and now have a property ready-made for girls’ weekends away, including a 44ft party room with cocktail bar, karaoke, disco lights and vintage record player with Eighties vinyl.
Initially they rented via Airbnb, but bookings are now made directly through the property’s website, The Scarlet Hen. Last year, the family moved out of their house in 33 out of 52 weeks. They try to take December and January off to enjoy their home.
Hughes’s sons, aged 18 and 21, are both studying events management at Manchester Metropolitan University but during the holidays they too move out of Norfolk House most weekends to make way for the hens.
Hughes says: “We stay in different holiday cottages most weeks. We have about ten favourites that we rotate, in rural towns like Holmfirth and Hebden Bridge, and villages like Haworth and Marsden. We really love going to a cottage that somebody else has cleaned, with a bottle of prosecco and a warm welcome waiting for you. We get a mini break every single weekend.”