Is 2026 the year of the destination house?

The way I’ve long picked my holidays is to choose a location and let the house or hotel follow suit. A week in Devon? Find a cottage. A city break in Rome? Pick a hotel near the Pantheon. The place came first; the roof over your head was incidental. Not anymore.Something has shifted. Increasingly, the house is the holiday – pored over on Instagram, booked months in advance. The location comes second or barely registers at all. It’s a reversal so complete that I recently found myself celebrating my 30th birthday in a village I'd never heard of, simply because the building was extraordinary.New data backs up the anecdote. Nearly half of British families now take multi-generational holidays together in a single property, according to 2026 travel research – a marked swing from hotel-room bookings towards large, self-catered houses that hold grandparents, parents and children under one roof. And the demand for architecturally distinctive, large-group houses is no longer such a niche, it’s becoming the whole point.The striking exterior of ARC ThorpenessARCOne of the companies riding this most confidently is ARC, a collection of five architect-led houses across the UK sleeping up to 30. Founded during Covid by London architect Tom Leahy, their first property opened in 2022, but the portfolio now stretches from the Camel Estuary in Cornwall to the Peak District. The promise: the finish of a boutique hotel, but exclusively yours.The mission, Leahy tells me, was born from a simple insight. “Research we did found that adults go on an average of four holidays a year – three abroad and one in the UK – and we set out to try to shift that to a two-two ratio.” The holiday easiest to poach from Europe? The weekend away with friends – the kind where you’re not really there to see the place but to spend time together somewhere pretty. “We thought: what is it about French châteaux or Portuguese villas that draws people there?” says Leahy. “We figured out that really it’s a quality difference. They were all en-suite bedrooms, they had been invested in. The equivalent in England was someone's house or a threadbare stately home. Kitchens were designed for staff, not for groups cooking themselves. So we addressed that gap.”A bedroom at ARC Thorpeness ARCIt's a gap I recognise. Group trips I've taken in the past abroad shared the same ingredients: generous space, considered design, a kitchen built for socialising. The British equivalent, until recently, meant mismatched crockery and a single bathroom between eight.I opt to try ARC Thorpeness for my 30th birthday, curious whether a UK house can hold its own against that Continental pull. I’d never heard of Thorpeness before: a tiny Edwardian village on the Suffolk Heritage Coast, built as a fantasy holiday resort by Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie in the early 1920s, inspired by the stories of Peter Pan. Its boating lake, the Meare, has islands named after Neverland; its mock-Tudor cottages were designed for wealthy Londoners escaping the city. A century on, that escapist impulse endures – just in a different register.ARC’s house here is the village’s famous water tower, Grade II-listed and converted in 1929 by architect William Gilmour Wilson. From the outside it is imposing, almost ecclesiastical: five storeys of weatherboarded timber rising high above the Suffolk rooftops. Inside, it is an upside-down house. The kitchen – Miele everything, double ovens, a vast sociable island – sits four floors up. A cinema snug and yoga studio occupy the lower levels and the living room crowns the building at the fifth floor, spanning the entire former water tank, with 360-degree views across the village, out towards Aldeburgh and the steel grey-blue wash of the North Sea. You stand there and forget you’re in Suffolk. My group was spread across eight beautifully-decorated en-suite bedrooms, each configured to feel completely private. One of the best parts was that – on purpose – there’s no master bedroom, so all the rooms feel equal (long gone are the days of people running to claim the best bedrooms on entry, there’s just no need here). Outside: a heated pool, an eight-seater wood-fired hot tub, a South African braai and pizza oven in the courtyard. The house absorbed all our attention – it generated more conversation, more shared pleasure, more lingering images than any resort could have.The kitchen at ARC Thorpeness ARCOn the Saturday evening, we had a local chef come to cook for us, all organised by ARC, we just had to choose one of multiple menu options. (You can also organise breakfast pastries, yoga, wine tasting and a pizza night.) We chose the ‘farmers menu’, duck magret for meat eaters and sweetcorn fritters for veggies, followed by steak with a parma ham crisp and garlic rosti potato. And of course, lots of birthday cake for dessert. Read MoreOffering these kinds of experiences means you can focus on enjoying more time together as a group, my friends decorated the top two rooms with balloons and candles, and no one had to cook or worry about meal planning. It was perfect. During the day, we explored the bookshops and local pubs in Aldeburgh, stopping to marvel at the incredible bakeries like Two Magpies and Lawson’s Delicatessen.“People tend to book ARC who live within two hours’ drive of the house,” says Leahy when I ask who his guests are. “They’ve found us on Instagram, and it’s the architecture and design that draws them in. There's a real focus on moment-making. The intentional focus on design creates amazing images.” He pauses. “In a way, people are exhibiting who they are via their booking.”ARC Thorpeness ARCIt's a shift Leahy has watched accelerate since founding ARC. The big group stay has moved decisively away from the budget end of the market – hen-do chaos, someone always on the sofa bed – towards something more intentional. Architecturally ambitious houses with personality. Concierge services. Sustainability credentials with real weight: ARC is entirely fossil-fuel-free across its whole portfolio, which for listed buildings is no small engineering feat.The result is a new category of travel: the occasion stay. A milestone birthday. A family reunion. A long weekend where the guest list matters more than the postcode, and the house is chosen not for where it is but for what it communicates – about your taste, your values, the kind of time you want to have together.If how we holiday reveals something about who we are, then 2026 is the year we stopped choosing the beach and started choosing the building.A weekend at ARC Thorpeness starts from £3,400, arc.club