A six-bedroom Highland lodge on the shores of Loch Ness for the price of a modest London flat
Sealladh an Loch is an eco-friendly dream home that feels like it could pay for itself. Julie Harding takes a look.
Toby Keel
Anyone seeking a bolthole in the Highlands of Scotland need look no further than Sealladh an Loch, which sits almost on the banks of Loch Ness close to the village of Foyers. It's for sale at the moment for offers over £649,950 through Strutt & Parker.
Once ensconced, the buyers will be able to gaze towards the loch in search of Nessie and beyond to the dramatic forests and mountain ranges. And they'll be able to do so in the knowledge that their boiler won't be bankrupting them as they soak it all in, for this is not just an exquisite Highland escape, it's also a state-of-the-art eco home. In a part of the world where the temperature can easily sink below -10 degrees, that's good to know. Especially when you're talking about heating a six-bedroom house of 3,500+ sq ft with high ceilings, tiled floors and a central space big enough to swallow a full-sized snooker table.
The windows through which you'll gaze upon the craggy mountains and dark, mysterious waters are all triple glazed; the home — including all six bedrooms — is warmed via a ground-source heat pump, and even making a cup of tea won't involve boiling a whole kettle: there's a Zip Tap which produces boiling water on demand.
As you'll probably have guessed from the internal fittings and furniture — and the generic decorations, the folded towels on the beds and the absolute, immaculate lack of mess — the house is currently run as a holiday let. We did find the place on Air Bnb, where a week in May was listed at just under £6,000. It doesn't take the mathematical skills of Stephen Hawking to realise that if you rented the place out for even ten weeks a year at that sort of rate, this is a £650k house that could probably pay for itself — something you'd struggle to say of an equivalently-priced property in London (let's use this two-bedroom flat in Crystal Palace as an example).
It's probably far more complicated than we just made it seem — maintenance, insurance, taxes and so on — but for those keen on carrying on the holiday business as things are, the agents are best-placed to provide more info. We'll leave it to them.
For those wishing to buy the place as a Highland home for themselves, however, it'd be an eminently practical choice. The north shore of Loch Ness, as well as being magical and ethereally beautiful and so on, is a very easy drive from Inverness, where road, rail and air links to the rest of Scotland and beyond are straightforward.
We'd love to see the new incumbents put their own stamp on the place, from livening up the three reception rooms to making the most of the open-plan kitchen/dining room, perhaps adding more eco features, and letting their imagination run riot in the half-acre of gardens that surround the place. What an opportunity awaits.
Sealladh an Loch is for sale via Strutt & Parker at offers over £649,950 — see more details and pictures.
