A Winter Glow at Poundon House

Poundon House in Oxfordshire is a beautiful Queen Ann style house that welcomes the most wonderful weddings. Situated in open countryside and with far-reaching views towards Waddesdon it’s an idyllic location.

As Poundon is a family owned house, there’s a warm atmosphere and a laid back nature. The team know exactly what to do when it comes to weddings & events and are more than experienced with how the house works having hosted parties and gatherings for over ten years. But there’s another, rather wonderful, side to the house that I’d like to share with you today – The Retreats.

Well-being is such a focus for us all, whether you’re an over-stressed bride-to-be, a wedding supplier at the end of another manic season or someone who finds it a little hard to switch off from the noise that surrounds us on a daily basis, then stop… Just stop for a moment and read all about how sisters Alicia & Natalie could relax, refresh and recharge your batteries.

Winter Glow is a unique experience with Hygge vibes happening 3rd – 5th February 2017, here’s Alicia with some more info…

Alicia:

When I was a lawyer in the City, yoga was a wonderful escape from corporate life. Now it is my way of life and I am lucky enough to be able to open my family home to a cornucopia of yoga teachers and retreat companies.

Back in 2012 I left behind the greyness of the legal world for the colour of the wellbeing life and returned home to set up the yoga retreats side of Poundon House – our family business – an exclusive private country house venue in Oxfordshire. Poundon comes alive as a wedding venue over the summer months but we wanted to make the most of it outside of the wedding season and, having grown up there, I knew it was an ideal location for yoga retreats and well-being events.

Four years on, I like to think that we have turned Poundon into a vibrant destination yoga venue. And last summer, my sister Natalie and I went one step further and established our own retreats company (appropriately called ‘&SISTER’) that allows us to put our own special touches on the retreats that we host at the house. We take the passing of the seasons as the focus for the themes of our retreat and tie that in with the bucolic surroundings of Poundon. We are so lucky that our countryside location allows nature to provide the perfect backdrop to each of our events.

As well as the atmosphere and production of our retreats we invest a huge amount of research (and time spent on yoga mats up and down the country!) in discovering teachers that truly match up with our brand. One such teacher is the ethereal Saskia Price, who hosted our retreat, Indian Summer, in September. As well as Saskia leading morning and evening meditations and asana practices, together we incorporate barefoot portal walks, blind-folded yoga and fire and sound ceremonies into our unique and experiential retreats.

So, did this happen overnight..? Did we wave a magic wand, chant three oms and before you can say the seven chakras we converted a room set up for civil ceremonies and ‘I dos’ into a peaceful, atmospheric shala and retreat venue our guests rave about..? In a word, no. It took a little bit more work than that! Below I share all the little tips I have learnt about setting up for a yoga retreat to make our guests feel alive, restored and rejuvenated.

Atmosphere on arrival

We carry this sense of the personal through to the start of the retreat with our meet and greet service. We want the unwinding to start before our guests even step foot in the shala. As a family we have hosted many events and parties over the years and we know a warm welcome is so important. There should always be someone to greet guests with a big welcoming smile. If it is a winter retreat, like our Winter Glow weekend, then the house is extra warm and cosy with a roaring fire breathing life everywhere and hot water bottles put in the beds each night. I always ask guests if they would like a cup of tea on arrival and we usually have a special welcome drink or healthy snack like organic gluten-free flapjacks straight from the oven.

I believe that all the senses should be activated so we consider what essentials to put in the diffuser each day and for arrival I put oils in to ground guests such as doTERRA Balance, grounding blend.

Theme

All of our retreats are themed and we try to incorporate this into the set-up, for example on our Wild Spring yoga retreat in May with Saskia, we had a creative workshop and made garlands of fresh spring flowers. In everyone’s room we left a small collection of poems that conjured up the spirit of the season, with the guests encouraged to choose their favourite one and talk about why it spoke to them so much at our closing ceremony. I really feel that these little touches made the group even more excited about the Spring and the rebirth of the year.

The Shala

The shala is definitely the heart centre of a retreat space and needs to be prepared accordingly. We make sure we carry through our seasonal theme through our choice of subtle flowers and diffused scents in the shala. We also take care to limit the number of guests for our retreats: we know that in the long run experience is more important to us than the bottom line. This allows our guests to enjoy bountiful space to practice and ensures they will receive the proper care and attention from our teachers.

More about Poundon House

We are incredibly excited to be collaborating with Charlie Morgan for our &SISTER seasonal retreats calendar at Poundon House.

Charlie, an exceptional and sought-after yoga teacher, will be leading our ‘Winter Glow’ yoga retreat. Winter at Poundon House is a season of light and warmth, of being outside in the cold, coming into the home and hearth, and is the ultimate opportunity to create ‘hygge’.

As such, its one of our favourite seasons at Poundon, where a brisk walk in the sleepy countryside is followed by a turn in front of the fire or AGA. Roasting chestnuts in the fire, warm drinks, it is a season to celebrate light and warmth, friends and family. There will be plenty of time to stretch and open in the shala with Charlie, cosy down in front of the open fire and build up your internal energy for the rest of Winter whilst we wait for nature to awake with Spring.

It is a beautiful time of year at Poundon House. Retreating with us is a unique experience and one that will stay in your favourite memories forever.

You can find out all about the Retreat side of Poundon House right here. Or if you’d like to contact Alicia or Natalie you can drop them a note on enquiries@poundonhouse.com or call them on 07866 453 831.

If you’d like to learn more about Poundon House as a wedding venue then simply hop on over to the Venue Finder.

Lots of love… (I’m off to Hyyge!)