Enjoying a lock up & leave lifestyle in the heart of Poole

One of the huge benefits of moving to a Renaissance home is the freedom you have to ‘lock up and leave’ and feel safe in the knowledge that your home will be taken care of.

Gabrielle Hadley and Nick Evans moved to Renaissance Sandbanks Road in December last year after selling the majority of shares in their marketing company. They’re now enjoying their new ‘lock up and leave’ lifestyle and feel very secure whilst enjoying holidays and trips away from their new home.

“We sold most of our marketing company last year and kept a small share, but now that we’ve retired the idea is for us to travel. For the last 22 years that we spent running the company, we would go on holiday and take our laptops and work. 

“We moved to Renaissance Sandbanks Road in December 2021, and then in January we went to Portugal for two months. It was the first time we had been on holiday and we weren’t working. Gabrielle was Managing Director so keeping the company going had always been the most important thing. After selling most of our shares, we thought ‘we’ve released that responsibility now, we are retired and so we want to go and see more of the world’, including exploring more of this country.

“The idea that we’d be able to lock up and leave and feel that our home is safe and secure was actually one of the main reasons we decided to move to a Renaissance community, and we do feel entirely secure leaving this apartment. We’re off to Iceland next month for a scientific expedition and we’ll be away for a couple of weeks. Then we’ll be looking to book something for September/October time too. Next January, we’re travelling to South America, sailing from Southampton to the East coast, then all the way around, up the West Coast and then through the Panama canal and back into the Caribbean. That’s a 65 day trip and we’ll miss all of Winter in England.

“Having a Lifehost here five times a week is a nice relief whilst we’re away. We know that if we want someone to come in and check up once a week, Karen would come and do that for us. Not that we’ve ever had any issues before but we’d more than happily ask Karen to check the home for us. We feel happy to leave the car downstairs in the underground car park for any length of time and we feel totally secure here.

It’s interesting actually as we still go back up to Staffordshire for board meetings and the last time whilst we were there we thought ‘well we’ve got a few days in Staffordshire, why don’t we spend a few days in Winchester too’. So, on the way back we stopped in Winchester for a short trip. We’re enjoying the freedom now to be able to go wherever we want, whenever we want.

“For anyone in our position who has newly retired, living in a Renaissance community really is ideal for kicking off your retirement. If you don’t want the responsibility of your house anymore, don’t want to mow your lawn, tend your garden, clean the patio, that sort of thing - which I always found a total bore - it’s perfect. For anybody who wants to cut loose from that sort of life and have a life where you can ‘lock up and leave’, be here and have a great time but be able to go away when you want to and there’s no issue. You haven’t got to think about watering the plants outside or painting the drain pipes or whatever it is, it’s ideal.”