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Architect Richard Keys on an awful travel experience

Richard Keys runs architecture studio ByOthers. His partner Amy is a Director at Jinny Blom Landscape Design. They live in Peckham with their 3-year old daughter Bonnie and newborn Cosmo.

SOUVENIR: How has having little ones in tow changed your perspective on travelling?

RICHARD: I can tell you about one particular trip that went wrong. And then I could tell you about another trip that went really well, but also wasn't what we expected. We did this thing last summer where we went up to Scotland for nearly two weeks. We spent some time with my partner Amy's family but we also had five days at a beautiful hotel up in the Highlands.

We chose the hotel because it was an old, big country house with a dozen rooms or something like that. It had a really good restaurant and it was run by this young couple who inherited it from their parents and they revitalized the whole thing. You know the playbook.

So we were like, it will be fine, we'll put the baby monitor in, we'll sit downstairs and we'll drink as much as we can and eat a great dinner and then fall into bed… The first night Bonnie wouldn't settle, which was a bit annoying. So we were sort of tag-teaming a little bit and basically we missed the dinner slot. We'd booked the really nice restaurant in the hotel for the second night too, and chalked up Bonnie's bad settling to it being a new environment and so on. We got her settled, put her to bed, took the monitor downstairs, ordered two cocktails and instantly she woke up. She lost her mind and so we missed the only other night that we'd booked the really nice restaurant. We couldn't get her settled at all and we started to realise, as we were tag-teaming up and down the hotel, that you could hear her crying throughout the whole hotel because it was just an old stately home. It went on and on — one of the worst nights we've ever had with her — which only ended when I took her out in the buggy and pushed her around the car park at 3am when she finally fell asleep.

When we got up in the morning all the guests were staring at the three of us over breakfast. We tried to apologise for keeping people up, but it turned out there were couples there on their honeymoon and we were absolutely mortified. We still had two more nights there where we just felt completely uncomfortable. Bonnie slept fine after that but the restaurant was shut so we didn't have any nice dinners or anything like that.

We've since noticed that that hotel has become adults only.

The following summer we went to the northern border of Romania and we found this amazing country estate owned by an elderly architect couple, that had three or four beautifully handcrafted traditional wooden cabins on it. We flew out to Romania, got in the hire car, drove way up into the mountains and then we just had absolute peace and quiet. Bonnie was walking at that point so she could just wander around in the grass. There was no TV, no internet, so she just played with pine cones and picked flowers and it was so chilled. We did the occasional trip out and there's loads of weird stuff to see in Romania.

We went to this cemetery — strange, I know — but in Romania the gravestones reflect either the person and their occupation or how they died. So if you've got someone who's a farmer they might have a statue of them with a sheep. Or there are some really funny ones where, for example, a lady got hit by a car, so the statue is a car with the person falling over the bonnet. Very odd.

We went on some walks, and not much else. Which just shows the stark reality of how our priorities have shifted and what successful family trips look like now. And that's ok.