A SCOTTISH country house which had to cancel 2,250 group bookings and overnight stays scheduled throughout this year is adapting amid the coronavirus crisis by ramping up its offering of activities including recycling furniture, watercolour painting and hill walking.
It has secured funding of £200,000 from Bank of Scotland, through the coronavirus business interruption loan scheme to pay for overheads and support its new strategy.
READ MORE: Ian McConnell on Brexit: Hectoring Tories should get own house in order on Brexit: Opinion
Gartmore House, a 23-bedroom mansion and activity centre, was prior to the pandemic focused on offering group residential packages and conferences for up to 500 people, as well as providing craft activity workshops including quilting, upcycling furniture, dressmaking, knitting, and lace-making.
In March, the business was forced to close its doors temporarily because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It reopened partially in the summer but had to close again as a result of the latest lockdown restrictions. It now has 10 staff, compared with 30 before the March lockdown.
When it was announced large indoor public gatherings would not recommence this year, it decided to focus on increasing the number of activity workshops it could offer.
Gartmore House has increased the number of courses it offers on a diverse range of activities.
Customers can choose from two, four and six-day packages.
A sharp increase in demand for the activities it is offering means Gartmore House is hiring 30 new tutors on a freelance basis to run courses, with 10 people per class to allow for social distancing.
Gartmore House, built in the mid-18th century, said it had 200 courses planned and tutors contracted for 2022. It has 70 courses planned for next year.
Peter Sunderland, joint director at Gartmore House, said: “When lockdown hit, it hit us hard. All our summer bookings from local groups were cancelled, and soon after we realised welcoming back big groups might not happen again until 2021. We began hearing about more people taking up crafting during lockdown so knew there was appetite out there for our workshops once restrictions lifted. We decided to change our current business plan and focus solely on the activity groups we had to offer.”
He added: “Since bookings for the workshops went live, we’ve received hundreds of enquiries and have had to recruit new staff to cope with demand. Thanks to the support of Bank of Scotland, despite our conference facilities stopping, we’ve been able to introduce a new way of securing income during these challenging times, and begin preparing for a positive start to 2021.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here