The story
The house wasn't bought as a rental. We bought it in 2018 as a place for the kids' summers — somewhere on the east side of Shawnigan, the sunny end of the lake, west-facing dock. The first year we did almost nothing to it — slept in the rooms our kids picked, ate on the deck, wrote a list of what didn't work. The second year we put in the sauna, because by November we'd realized what the house actually wanted to be. The kitchen came in 2021. The cottage next door came up the year after that and we took it, because we'd watched too many of our friends get split between two rentals on family weekends.
We open the property to other people now for forty or so weeks a year. Weddings most weekends in summer. A handful of corporate retreats in the shoulder seasons. The rest is families. We live close. If something breaks at 9pm, one of us will drive over.
Most weeks of the year there's a moment, usually Sunday around eleven, when whoever's been staying drives out and one of us walks the property to check the firepit and the sauna and the dock — and we end up sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs for an hour, because we keep forgetting we don't get to live here.
It's not a hotel. It's a house we love, that we let other people use.
