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Not exactly your bog standard holiday home? It’s built from native woods, insulated with British wool, decorated with environmentally friendly paints, equipped with energy-efficient appliances, and furnished with recycled furniture and organic textiles. Solar panels provide hot water in summer and a wood pellet stove keeps the place warm in winter. But this is no exclusive second-home-owner’s rural eco-idyll.

The ‘Ecocabin’ was conceived, built and launched explicitly for holiday letting - and it’s proving highly successful. In the year since it opened, 90% of guests have been attracted by the accommodation’s green credentials, which have won praise even from those who have rented it for other reasons - such as its Shropshire location. The woman behind it is not, as you might suppose, a seasoned industry professional with a canny eye for a new niche market.

Kate Grubb is a former veterinary nurse, with a farmer husband and a three-year-old daughter. She was cleaning some local holiday cottages to earn extra cash when she got the idea. Shocked by the amount of rubbish left by guests - and the realisation that most had stocked up at supermarkets at ‘home’ rather than buying from her neighbours - she set out to create a more environmentally sound and community-friendly alternative.

The result - the Ecocabin - scooped Gold in last autumn’s Heart of England Excellence in Tourism Awards. It took around 18 months, and £85,000, to source the materials and complete the construction. That’s probably more than the ‘conventional’ equivalent, but backing from Defra, The Prince’s Trust, Women In Rural Enterprise (WIRE) and Triodos Bank helped make it a viable proposition.

“I was very honest from the start, that this is a business and it has been done to make an income,” says Kate. “But it’s also about the principles I believe in, and it’s very important to show that just because something is ecologically responsible it doesn’t have to lose money.” - Alison Winward

8 March 2006

Alison Winward