Sorn business: Lintmill Lodges to open in East Ayrshire

Nicola Young and partner Alan Stewart have been planning Lintmill Lodges on Catrine Road in Sorn for over four years.

Along with help from their son Jackson, Nicola and Alan's visions and plans are almost ready to go.

Nicola, Alan and Jackson all smiles at the lodges. (Image: Submitted)

The idea came from Nicola initially being furloughed from her job at a Mauchline vets, after 24 years of working there.

Having toyed with the idea of opening a luxury lodge area, the couple decided to just to jump into the idea, with lodges now in place and everything almost ready to go.

Being from Sorn, but now living in Auchinleck, Nicola is thrilled at how things have gone over the past four years, but admits the journey wasn't without its challenges.

The site during the process. (Image: Lintmill Lodges)

She said: “I was furloughed at the start of the lockdown and I thought about the idea there and then it turned into a range of ideas for what we wanted.

“There were a few times when we wondered if it would go ahead and we were trying to get funding and things like that.

“We thought that we had to just jump in to this plan and just go for it.

“We struggled to get help with banks who didn’t really have an interest in supporting new businesses at the time.

“The last few months, everything has really seemed to come together, because there was a point where you looked at the site and you wondered how these lodges were going to fit in here."

Initially, they had spoken to franchising companies, but they wanted to build six lodges in the space.

However, Nicola thought that this amount of lodges would be a slightly overbearing, and so settled on three lodges with their own wood-fired hot tub.

One of the luxury lodges, named Thistle, is also pet-friendly.

With all the hard work that's been put into getting to this stage, Nicola is now eager to get going.

She added: “We were hoping to get opened earlier this year, but things have happened a delayed that a bit, so we’re just waiting on licenses an things coming through.

"We've come along way and we just really want to see people coming in and enjoying the spaces now.

“We think our target market might be people from outside of Ayrshire. Which is kind of understandable because you know what it’s like when people think about things on their doorsteps.

“We know that people in the cities love to come and visit the countryside and just switch off for a few days.

“I’ll calculate it once we’re finished how far over budget we are. But I think at the start we thought it might be about £150,000, but it’s well beyond that.

"We've already got plans about how we want to take things forward, but we'll learn to walk before we can run."

You can find out more about the lodges on the Lintmill Lodges website.