onefinestay Brand Guidelines: A 2009 London Home-Rental Start, Accor & The Exclusive Collective

Three founders, six homes and a launch in May 2010.

onefinestay began in London in 2009. English Wikipedia says the idea came to co-founder Greg Marsh after a trip to Pisa: back in his London flat, he realised that the home had stood empty while he was away, and that someone else could have been staying in it each time he travelled. Marsh founded the company with Demetrios Zoppos and Tim Davey in September 2009, the same source says, with early money from family and friends.

The website went live in London in May 2010 with six homes listed, Marsh’s own among them, according to Wikipedia. The model sat somewhere between a hotel and a private let. Homeowners offered their houses and flats while they were away, and onefinestay took care of the reservations, the cleaning before and after each stay, the linen and the welcome, putting away valuables and anything the owner did not want on show. Wikipedia says the company turned down most of the homes offered to it, and learned each accepted home in enough detail to answer guests’ questions about it.

Venture funding followed. Wikipedia says Index Ventures led a Series A round in February 2011, with angel investors including Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com. Expansion came city by city: New York in May 2012, Los Angeles and Paris in September 2013, and Rome in March 2016, according to the same source. By the time of its sale, its backers also included Intel Capital and the hotel group Hyatt, which had joined a funding round in June 2015, UKTN reported in April 2016.

A hotel group buys a home-rental brand.

In April 2016 the French hotel group AccorHotels, now Accor, bought onefinestay. UKTN reported the deal on 5 April 2016, together with a further investment commitment from Accor to help the business grow internationally. Marsh said at the time that the plan was to launch onefinestay in more than 40 new markets over the next five years, and that it would continue to operate as an independent business run by its founders and management team. Sébastien Bazin, Accor’s chairman and chief executive, described the purchase as a step into what he called the serviced homes market.

Marsh left the company that September, English Wikipedia says. Under Accor the offer widened from city homes towards villas and chalets. In June 2025 ShortTermRentalz described onefinestay as a provider of professionally managed luxury homes, villas and chalets with hotel-style services such as concierge and housekeeping, and reported that Accor had later partly written down the value of the brand as it faced challenges in scaling the model.

The service is described in similar terms across the sources. Wikipedia lists a personal welcome and a tour of the home, professional housekeeping, linen and round-the-clock guest support, and names travel partners such as Centurion, the American Express travel service, and Signature. It also says that in New York the company offers stays of 30 nights or more. A February 2026 company announcement describes a curated portfolio of about 3,000 private villas, chalets and residences in destinations including London, Paris, New York City and Los Angeles, and says onefinestay also works for homeowners who want their property professionally managed and listed.

Design and documentation.

Holiday rental companies fall into two broad groups: marketplaces, which list homes run by others, and managers, which run the homes themselves. Vacasa, which English Wikipedia describes as a vacation rental management company, and Sonder, which leased and operated its own apartments, belong to the second group. A manager answers to owners or landlords as well as to guests, and Vacasa built a separate app for the owners whose homes it looked after, according to the same source.

Search and listing pages carry much of this work. In 2019 Vacasa began showing its rental homes directly in Google search results, English Wikipedia says, and in July 2026, ShortTermRentalz reported, TravelAI relaunched Sonder.com as a booking site whose listings would be selected for design, location and quality. In a 2020 profile, Surface magazine illustrated Sonder with photographs of its interiors in Philadelphia, Savannah and Montreal, and quoted its founder on celebrating “architecture and the arts.”

Naming follows ownership. When Marriott International signed its licensing agreement with Sonder in August 2024, the portfolio was to join its system as a collection called “Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy.” In 2026 the operator Prism opened former Sonder buildings in the United States under its Belvilla brand, as Belvilla District 6, and Casago’s franchisees trade under place names such as Casago San Diego and Casago Belize, ShortTermRentalz reported.

Apps sit at the centre of the guest’s stay. Surface described Sonder guests receiving an access code and concierge services through an app in place of a front desk. This guide sets out each company’s founding, owners, listings and sales as dated facts, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

From Accor to a group of luxury travel brands.

In June 2025 Accor agreed a deal with Exclusive Resorts, the luxury travel club majority-owned by the AOL co-founder Steve Case through his Revolution Places vehicle. Reports at the time differed on the size of the stake. Skift reported on 24 June 2025 that the companies had confirmed Exclusive Resorts would take “a controlling interest” and operational control, and quoted Case saying that onefinestay would anchor a new villa rental business. Two days later ShortTermRentalz reported that Accor described the agreement as one that let it keep a majority stake. Financial terms were not disclosed.

By December 2025 the position was clearer. When Exclusive Resorts’ owner announced The Exclusive Collective, a multi-brand luxury travel platform, together with an agreement to buy the travel subscription company Inspirato, ShortTermRentalz reported on 19 December 2025 that it already held a controlling interest in onefinestay, bought from Accor earlier that year. The Inspirato purchase was completed on 3 February 2026, according to a joint announcement published that day. The Exclusive Collective says it serves about 24,000 high-net-worth travellers a year across Exclusive Resorts, Inspirato and onefinestay, with more than 3,000 leased and professionally managed homes operated by Inspirato and onefinestay, and it names Case as its majority owner.

Through both changes of owner the company has kept its name, written as a single lowercase word in its own announcements. Its homes are still found in the cities where it began, with London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles named first in the 2026 description of the business.

For a design guide, onefinestay shows how a home-rental brand can borrow the manners of a hotel — the welcome, the housekeeping, the concierge — while its guests stay in other people’s homes. Compare Plum Guide, another London company built on selecting homes, and Airbnb. For this guide we use ink blue, warm stone and a muted brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep onefinestay’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.