Original Cottages Brand Guidelines: The Reepham Agency Begun as Norfolk Country Cottages

A Reepham business that grew from one county.

Original Cottages began in the market town of Reepham, north-west of Norwich. According to Reepham Life, the town’s community paper, writing in May 2022, the business began trading as Norfolk Country Cottages and was founded by Richard and Lesley Ellis in 1992. Companies House shows a company incorporated in April 1992 under the name Norfolk Country Cottages Limited, renamed in 2014.

It started small. Reepham Life said the business began in the Ellises’ own cottage in Whitwell Street, moved to Carlton House on the Market Place in 1994, later took over the neighbouring Melton House and its shop, and in 2014 bought what is now Bank House, also on the Market Place, as its head office. By then, the paper said, it was known as the Original Cottage Company. A plan to move the Reepham staff into a new building on land off Dereham Road was proposed in 2019, the paper added, but was never carried through.

The business grew by adding regional agencies rather than by running everything under one name. In May 2022 Reepham Life described it as owning holiday-let brands across the UK, including Norfolk Cottages and Suffolk Secrets, and as one of Reepham’s largest employers, with more than 100 of its 400 staff working in the town, at 36 offices and across some 25 holiday brands.

From Cottage Holidays to Original Cottages.

The consumer brand has changed name more than once. In August 2018 the Dereham Times reported that the family-owned company, with its head office in Reepham, had changed its name from Cottage Holidays to Original Cottages the previous year, in 2017. The paper said the business then had 4,600 holiday homes through 21 agencies around the country, including Norfolk Cottages and Salt Norfolk, and quoted the company describing the move as gathering its properties more effectively under the Original Cottages brand.

That structure, a national booking brand above a set of regional agencies with their own names and offices, runs through every account of the business. Reepham Life counted some 25 holiday brands in 2022, up from the 21 agencies the Dereham Times listed four years earlier, and Norfolk Cottages appears in both reports as one of the local names gathered under the national site.

The company’s legal names follow a similar path. Companies House lists The Original Cottage Company Limited, incorporated in July 2009, as an active company describing its business as reservation services. Until May 2022 its controlling shareholder was The Original Holding Company Limited, the renamed Norfolk Country Cottages company of 1992.

Design and documentation.

Holiday cottage agencies sell places rather than products, and their pages are built around the property photograph. A typical listing opens on an exterior shot of a cottage, a cabin or a tent in its landscape, followed by interiors, the view from the door and, increasingly, the hot tub or the log burner. The companies publish these images themselves, usually taken for the agency or supplied by the owner, and the look of a brand is set as much by that photography as by any logo.

Naming follows the way people plan a break. Agency menus are organised by region (the Lake District, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, North Wales) and by collection: dog-friendly cottages, cottages with a hot tub, coastal cottages, large houses for groups, last-minute breaks. Sykes Holiday Cottages, for example, lists collections of this kind alongside its region pages, and glamping and campsite platforms apply the same logic to shepherd’s huts, yurts, treehouses and pitches.

Search is the core interface. Guests enter a place, dates and party size, then filter by features and browse results as a list or on a map. Some groups now add conversational search: in February 2026 Awaze said it had launched an app within ChatGPT that starts with Cottages.com and returns live availability from a plain-language request.

Behind the consumer brands sits a second audience: property owners. Most agencies run separate pages that invite owners to let their home through them, and corporate sites describe group structures. Several of the names in this guide belong to larger groups: Cottages.com to Awaze, and Sykes Holiday Cottages to Forge Holiday Group, the parent brand Sykes launched in 2023. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it, and what it publishes, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family business that joined Travel Chapter.

After three decades the Ellis family sold. In May 2022 Reepham Life reported that Original Cottages, owned and run by the family for 30 years, had been taken over by Travel Chapter, the self-catering holiday rentals company based in Devon, for an undisclosed amount. Companies House confirms the change: it lists The Travel Chapter Limited, registered at Bideford, as the controlling shareholder of The Original Cottage Company Limited from 4 May 2022, and that company’s registered office is now Travel Chapter House.

Travel Chapter had itself changed hands shortly before. In January 2022 ShortTermRentalz reported that the private equity firm ECI Partners had sold Travel Chapter to its management team, with investment from Intermediate Capital Group, and said Travel Chapter then offered about 8,000 properties across the UK through brands including holidaycottages.co.uk, Canine Cottages and Cottages & Castles. Travel Chapter describes holidaycottages.co.uk as the core brand in its network, and its brands page, read in November 2026, still lists the Original Cottages website among its national brands, alongside regional names such as Norfolk Cottages and Suffolk Secrets. Travel Chapter also says it became a certified B Corp in July 2024. It describes its collection as running from boats to barns, tents to treehouses and cottages to castles, across the UK and Ireland, and calls its people “the holiday home people.” Its registered office, like that of The Original Cottage Company, is in Bideford, so the Reepham business is now run from a group whose registered office is in north Devon.

The buyer had grown through deals of its own. ShortTermRentalz reported that ECI had bought its stake in 2018 and that Travel Chapter had since completed seven acquisitions, the most notable being Sally’s Cottages, a Lake District agency with more than 500 properties, in June 2021. TTG, reporting the same management sale, added that Travel Chapter had bought Dyfi Cottages, with about 50 properties around southern Snowdonia, the previous December, and named Farm Holidays and the Welsh specialist Sugar & Loaf among its other brands. When the Original Cottages deal was reported, Reepham Life noted that neither side had said whether the Original Cottages name would continue. Travel Chapter’s brands page answers that: the name and its website remain in use.

The result is a brand that kept its name inside a larger group. Original Cottages remains a national umbrella for regional agencies, now one of several national names Travel Chapter runs beside its flagship site.

For a design guide, Original Cottages shows how a national name can sit above local agency brands without replacing them. Compare Holiday Cottages, the core brand of the same owner, and Classic Cottages, another family-founded agency. For this guide we use a hedgerow green, a barley and a reed gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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