We Look Forward to Seeing You!
 
It's a large house with two great rooms, one on the second floor and one on the ground floor. The second floor has four bedrooms: There are two bedrooms facing the river; one of them has a queen bed and one has a king. There are two other bedrooms up there: One faces the woods out back and has a queen bed. The other faces the meadow and has two bunk beds (four twin beds total). There is also a single twin bed out in the common room on that floor. Downstairs, in the living room, there is a sleeper sofa. In the parlor downstairs, there is another sleeper sofa. Each of them is a queen size.

There are two full bathrooms upstairs, with tub and shower, and one full bathroom downstairs, with an old-fashioned tub and a shower. Each bathroom is separate from the bedrooms, but the one downstairs has a semi-private hallway coming from the parlor.

The living room of the house includes a stereo system with an iPod connector. In the parlor is a Philips 27-inch CRT television with premium cable service. The house also has high-speed wireless internet service (802.11b), and the kitchen has a modern refrigerator with an icemaker, a modern convection electric oven and a glass cooktop, a microwave, a coffee maker, a large espresso machine and a toaster oven, plus plenty of good-quality, matched dishes, flatware, mugs, cups and utensils. There is a charming fireplace in the parlor.

All linens are supplied and the mattresses and box springs are in good shape and of good quality. We also have a high-quality washer and dryer set in a separate laundry room.

If you'd like to rent River House for a few days or a few weeks, please drop us a line. Large parties are welcome, and pets are usually OK; just please clear them with us first.

To check available dates, please click here.

The rent is $325 per night with a two-night minimum stay. We offer a 20% discount for stays of at least five nights. There is a $95 cleaning fee. We require a $250 non-refundable deposit to confirm a reservation, and payment of the balance of the full rental amount, plus a $500 security deposit, no later than 30 days in advance of your stay. Well-behaved, non-destructive pets are OK with our prior approval, but we do charge an additional $55 for cleaning. Our rates are subject to change until you confirm the booking. The rates on this page are current. They supersede any inconsistent rates on other sites, which may occasionally be out of date.

We support Vacations for Veterans, a non-profit group that provides vacations to wounded veterans at participating homes across the country.

What to Expect

We've been renting out River House for over three years now since we remodeled it. Somewhere around thirty or forty families, young, middle-aged and older, from all over the country, have stayed there summer, fall, winter and spring. Our guest responses have been overwhelmingly positive, as reflected in the comments on these pages. Still, we believe that in large part, positive guest responses boil down to expectations, so we really want you to know what to expect.

River House is on the southern edge of Tamworth, a small town in the Lakes Region of rural New Hampshire, which is naturally scenic and blessed by nature and home to a wide range of people, from urban vacationing Bostonians to farmers, craftspeople, professionals, tradespeople and blue-collar workers. This is a rural location, popular as a vacation spot because of all the lakes, rivers and mountains. The climate can be warm and often humid in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter. We get a lot of summer thunderstorms and winter snows.

River House is a relaxed, casual, old-fashioned vacation home, not a fancy hotel or resort. The renovated parts include the kitchen, plumbing, heating, electrical system, appliances, insulation, plaster, interior paint, much of the furniture, and the bathrooms, and the majority of the furniture. The old parts include the wood shed by the meadow, the deck out back and the screen porch (which is bare wood, very common for that part of the country). And we still have to do the last few details of the remodel, e.g., refinishing some of the upstairs and parlor wood floors, varnishing some interior trim and adding a cabinet to the laundry room. (The exterior paint also needs redoing soon, although we did touch it up recently.)

The house is on a private dirt road across from a river with a tiny, sandy beach. It backs up to a large forest and there are two other homes on our side of the bridge, along with one meadow and a larger field. One of the two other houses, where our caretakers live, is just across the meadow from ours, and they have a vegetable garden and a barn there. Their horse, Angel, often grazes in our meadow. A few people occasionally fly-fish in the river out front.

During the wintertime, people have been known to exercise draft horses on the road out front, pulling weighted sleighs with jingling harnesses. Across the bridge, the street is an old, very bumpy asphalt road leading down from a two-lane country highway (Route 25). Sometimes horses poop in the road. Up at the highway is the original post office building, which needs to be torn down or rebuilt. Unfortunately, this house gives a bad first impression to those first turning down the road, but once you get across the bridge, you realize how nice the setting is. (By the way, that post office property is for sale, and it's a few acres right on Cold Brook, for around $100,000. It could be a great location to build a house down from the highway.)

In short, River House is suited to people who want to spend a lot of time in the outdoors and relax in a comfortable, casual home. It is a jeans-and-bathing-suit kind of place, a 165-or-so-year-old country home that happens to have been remodeled recently. It is a mixture of old and new.

We hope that this gives you a decent sense of what to expect. If you want a comfortable, warm, well-provisioned, functional, roomy vacation home on a river in a small-town, rural area, we're here for you. If you want a fancy, resort-type atmosphere, we're probably not a good choice for you.

Either way, PLEASE ASK whatever questions you may have. If you are unclear as to what to expect, or have particular needs, we cannot resolve your specific questions if you do not ask them. We have literally hundreds of photos of the house and its environs that we can send you, and we are very good about responding to phone calls and emails. We are also happy to set up visits ahead of time so you can check it out. Thank you.