About Us

Broadgate Farm Cottages – East Yorkshire holiday cottages

Broadgate Farm is owned by Elaine Robinson & Stephen Holtby, we bought the Farm in 2006 and developed the holiday cottages after gaining planning permission in 2008. Since then we have transformed the farm by renovating the buildings, removing the huge 2½ storey grey painted tin grain dryer in the area between the cottages and the fields, we also removed a large pole barn that sat behind the Stables, Granary and Barn House.

Elaine & Steve at Broadgate Farm East Yorkshire Holiday Cottages

Developing the holiday cottages

Fortunately Steve had run his own Building Company for over 40 years and is particularly skilled at restoring old buildings so we set about converting the holiday cottages and opening up the site by removing the dryer and the pole barn. The benefit of using Steve’s building company was that we know that the cottages have been developed to a high standard, the downside was that Steve often had the pull the men off the barns to work for other customers. This mean’t that any target opening dates had a habit of moving backwards! It is very useful having a builder on the premises, if a repair is needed we can be right onto it!

The first cottages to be developed were the Forge and the Stables which opened in September 2009, the Barn House and the Granary followed in May 2010 and Foldyard opened in September 2011. After a bit of a break we developed another cottage the Cart House in the summer of 2015. In total we can now sleep just over 40 people.

We transformed the farm from the scene you see below to the lovely holiday cottages you now see on the farm. We are very proud of what we have achieved, both of us have worked hard and have invested our hard earned savings in developing this business. Fortunately we are financially independent and can run the business without the interference of  investors or financiers, we put our guests needs at the forefront and firmly believe that if we keep guests happy, invest and keep our standards up the business will succeed.

Before the holiday cottages

Old barns before the renovation into holiday cottages

The buildings that now form the Cart House – the tin dryer in the background has been removed to open up the views.

The Forge holiday cottage before we renovated it

Hard to believe that this was once the Forge, now a lovely 2 bedroom cottage.

Opening our holiday cottages in East Yorkshire

We initially planned to market the cottages through an agency but because we did not have a firm opening date decided to develop our own website just to raise some awareness of the cottages. This worked so well that we have continued to manage all the bookings ourselves, Elaine’s background is in marketing so we have developed the business through our own website and selective advertising. We prefer to deal direct with our guests so that we can offer the best possible service and this means that we can offer best value by cutting out the middlemen.

Steve handles all the development & maintenance and is in charge of the outside areas and our growing numbers of animals. Elaine runs the cottages organising all the housekeeping, running the office, bookings and marketing including the website. We are helped by our housekeeping & gardening team. Living on the farm we are always on hand if guests need assistance or advice, we have met some lovely people over the years. Our daughter Lauren is now also getting involved in the running of the business and will take a greater role in the coming years.

Eco-friendly development

The heat and hot water for our cottage development is supplied by a series of Ground Source Heat Pumps, we draw heat from the fields around the cottages through a network of pipes, these feed into the heat pumps. The heat pumps are powered by electricity and for every unit we put in the heat pump works it’s magic and produces more units of heat – this can be 3 times what you put in. All our heat pumps are supplied by Kensa Engineering a UK based manufacturer. This means you have nice toasty cottages in the colder months. We also have solar thermal panels on the larger cottages which kick in to heat the water in the summer and we now generate electricity with solar pv panels.

We trade from and all cottages located on our farm in East Yorkshire, UK.