Down a mossy track fifteen minutes from Bury St Edmunds sits The Engine House, a rural Suffolk Airbnb with an unusual backstory: it spent more than a century abandoned. Built to generate electricity for a nearby stately home, it later served briefly as a vegetable store in the 1940s before falling silent, its two oil-covered engines still in place when art director and photographer Sandy Suffield found it.
Suffield's renovation is the reason design lovers keep booking. The building's Victorian quarry tiles had dissolved when she tried to restore them, so she had a new set made to the original terracotta-and-black pattern — the striking floor that anchors the lofty kitchen and dining space. She extended the old bones with a contemporary wing that follows the interior glass walls around a courtyard garden, adding three spacious bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a sunken snug, a mezzanine, and a ground-floor bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. The styling leans on her flea-market habit and prop-buying work for Kinfolk: design books, shells, baskets and trinkets everywhere, but nothing too precious to actually live in.
A recent group of old university friends — one with a six-week-old baby — put it through its paces over a few autumn days, and the verdict was that it handles a full house gracefully. The big wooden dining table coped with cheese boards and wine; the snug fire coped with the evenings. The advice from guests: bring your own candles and table linens and settle in properly.
The surrounding area rewards a slow weekend. Coffee and pastries at Folk, a farm-shop-café hybrid with a restaurant and gift shop, sets the tone. Wyken Gardens and Vineyard does lunch from locally sourced produce with its own wines, best enjoyed outside among the alpacas. In Bury St Edmunds itself, there are independent shops such as Smoking Monkey Antiques, and The Nutshell — reputedly Britain's smallest pub, seating around eight people with a window bench and a corner seat and nothing else.
Why it matters: this is the sweet spot for a design-led group staycation that doesn't demand white-glove behaviour — think friend reunions, a low-key birthday, or a first trip away with a newborn. Three bedrooms, generous communal space and an unfussy attitude make it work for exactly the kind of gathering hotels rarely accommodate well. Autumn is arguably its best season, when the light hits that kitchen around 4pm and the fire in the snug earns its keep.
Condé Nast Traveller UK