Invitation to Tuscany Ltd

We’re a family company that visits every property and meets every owner so we can help you find your ideal holiday home. We’ve been exploring Tuscany and Italy for over four decades, finding the best villas for rent: we know the area and the culture intimately.

We moved to Tuscany in 1974 to live in a tumbledown Tuscan farmhouse with no electricity, no running water and no telephone. By 1976 the tumbledown house was just about habitable for other humans, and we were keen to visit England for a few weeks. An ad in the Times and a few letters later (still no phone at home!) we had our first customer who would stay in our house while we drove back to the UK for a month. Taking a break from filming Doctor Who, Tom Baker was our very first paying guest; he went home and told his friends about our place. By the next year, we had cobbled together an apartment we could move into when renting the main house, and soon our Tuscan neighbours were asking us to help them let out their homes; by 1982, my mother was running a fully-fledged villa company.

My sister and I were enlisted to draw the houses for our print brochure, first as black and white ink sketches and later as watercolour sketches. Every year we would prepare next year’s brochure with hand drawings of all the properties, and some of the villages and towns too. The brochures were beautiful and it was very sad when we finally stopped producing them in 2014.

You’ll still some of the sketches throughout the website; the habit of visiting and drawing the houses has not left me and I enjoy spending a long time observing and absorbing the nature of each place. My mother retired in 2005, when I took over, while my sister Sally manages the books. My wife Sam and our two children help me scout out properties. Plus we have a small team of long-serving staff who help in our offices in London and Tuscany, and a handful of agents around the world who know our villas inside and out.

Our listings vary from charming small houses in village centres to luxurious Tuscan estates amid the vineyards. Regardless of the size or luxury of any property I have a rule – if my family wouldfeel uncomfortable there, I won’t list it. We want people to relax in our villas, and not panic if they spill a bit of olive oil on the table.