Christmas and New Year at Waterwynch House
There is a particular kind of Christmas that most families think about at some point but relatively few manage to pull off. Everyone together. Properly together, not across three different houses with lunch in one place and the children sleeping in another. One roof, one table, one stretch of coastline outside the window, for the whole of the holiday.
Waterwynch House makes that possible.
The house sits above the beach at Waterwynch Bay, a secluded stretch of coastline just outside Tenby, in Pembrokeshire. It sleeps up to 30 guests across 12 ensuite bedrooms, with five reception rooms, a bar, a cinema room, a games room and ten acres of private gardens and woodland. In winter, with the Christmas tree up in the Great Hall and the sea visible through the Sky Room windows, it takes on a quality that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere.
Why Christmas works differently at Waterwynch
The practical argument for hiring an exclusive-use house for Christmas is straightforward. Everyone stays under the same roof. There is no splitting the family across hotels or coordinating between houses on Christmas morning. The kitchen is big enough to actually cook in. The dining room seats everyone together. And when Christmas dinner is finished and the afternoon settles into that particular post-lunch quietness, there is a cinema room, a games room, a bar and a beach a short walk away.
But the more compelling argument is harder to articulate and easier to feel once you are there. A house of this scale, in a setting like this, changes the atmosphere of Christmas in a way traditional hotels simply cannot. It feels like somewhere. It feels, for the duration of the stay, like it belongs to the people in it.
That is what guests who have spent Christmas at Waterwynch tend to describe when they talk about it afterwards. Here’s what they say.
Christmas at Waterwynch: One Week, Twenty People, One Roof
Waterwynch at Christmas
We were at Waterwynch for a week at Christmas, an extended family of twenty, though not everyone arrived at once. As hosts we were there from the first day, which turned out to be exactly right. The house was already dressed for Christmas: trees up, fairy lights on, decorations in place. That first quiet day, settling in before the others arrived from their respective journeys and work schedules, had its own particular pleasure. The anticipation of family coming to the house, one by one over the following days, put us in the Christmas spirit before Christmas had properly begun.
By Christmas Eve everyone was there.
Dinner that evening was a pre-prepared home-cooked fish pie, reheated in the AGA. The family kitchen is genuinely well set up for a group of this size: generous worktop space, a large central island for laying food out ready to serve, and enough room for several people to be doing different things at once without getting in each other's way. For the whole week we self-catered entirely from the family kitchen, barely needing to venture into the separate catering kitchen beyond borrowing the occasional pan or utensil. While the fish pie warmed we had Aperol Spritz and Prosecco, then the fish pie, then a cheese board, then the kind of evening that drifts pleasantly without needing to go anywhere in particular. After dinner, the more musically inclined passed the acoustic guitar around for a singalong.
Christmas Day was special in the way that only a Christmas where everything goes roughly right can be. People sorted themselves out for breakfast as and when they surfaced. A few took an early morning dip in the sea, although they appeared to have misjudged the duration somewhat, arriving back shivering and spending a considerable amount of time pressed up against the AGA to recover. There was the customary debate about whether presents should be opened in the morning or after dinner. The children ensured it was the morning.
Then the cooking began, which with twenty people and an AGA became something of an event in itself. The canapé team produced their wares at eleven and the champagne was opened. Team Turkey had already got the bird into the roasting oven. The roast potatoes were slotted into the roasting oven, plates warming in the warming oven, vegetables on the hotplates. The salmon starter emerged from one corner of the kitchen. The Christmas pudding from another. Everyone involved, everyone with a role, and then everyone sitting down together for dinner in the dining room, which looks directly out over the sea. The combination of subdued lighting, a table that seats the whole group and a view across the water made it feel, without any effort or orchestration, exactly like a Christmas dinner should feel. Great conversation, a great deal of wine, and the particular satisfaction of a meal that twenty people had produced between them.
A few people needed the sofas afterwards. They came around eventually. The evening was spent listening to music and a loose collection of party games that nobody took entirely seriously.
Boxing Day began slowly and stayed that way, which was exactly what was needed. A few of us walked down to the beach to clear our heads. The tide was out, the sea calm, and the only sound was the quiet movement of the waves. We looked into one of the caves at the edge of the bay. It smelled of salt and damp, water dripping from the roof and leaving small impressions in the wet sand below. Cold cuts for lunch and dinner. Relaxed conversation. The snooker table and dartboard came into their own in the evening, as they tend to on Boxing Day at Waterwynch.
New Year at Waterwynch: Two Ways It Can Go
Tenby New Year Fireworks from Waterwynch
New Year at Waterwynch can be many things, and the house adapts to whichever version your group needs. Two New Years spent here illustrate the range as well as anything.
The first was a quiet one. Two families, self-catered throughout the week, relaxed and unhurried. New Year's Eve began with a meal at the house before the group walked into Tenby along the coastal path for drinks. What followed was one of those unexpectedly brilliant evenings. Tenby's fireworks display is a serious affair: loud, prolonged and close enough that you can smell the gunpowder. The walk back along the coastal path in the dark, phone torches doing their best work, became its own small adventure. New Year's Day brought the Saundersfoot swim: thousands of people descending on the beach in the cold for what has become one of the great annual gatherings on this stretch of coast. The atmosphere is joyful, communal and slightly surreal in equal measure. The walk back and a day settled in front of the television with a home-cooked meal felt exactly right.
The second New Year was a larger and louder affair: a big group of friends and their teenage and early twenties children, catered every day by one of our preferred local catering teams whose cooking across a week of varied meals for all tastes and appetites was, without exaggeration, outstanding. New Year's Eve began with Margaritas and Mojitos in the Great Hall before a formal dinner, the kind of opening to an evening that signals everyone has decided to do this properly. Then the group moved outside to build a beach fire, the younger members doing most of the heavy work with the logs, which generated considerably more laughter than efficiency. The fire, once lit, did what beach fires at Waterwynch always do: it gathered everyone around it and held them there.
Before midnight the group walked to the point at the edge of the grounds, a promontory that looks directly across towards Tenby. From there the fireworks appear differently than they do from the town square. At that elevation, across the water, you notice things you wouldn't notice from below: the burst of light arriving a beat before the sound reaches you, the smoke drifting across the town in the stillness, and on the clearest moments, the faint glow of fireworks further along the coast towards the Gower and Swansea, the whole sweep of the bay marking midnight in its own way. The group huddled together against the cold, the older members sensibly claiming the swing seat at the edge of the point. Both perspectives are remarkable in their own way. Standing in Tenby's square with gunpowder in the air is one kind of New Year. Watching it all unfold from above and across the water, the bay lit up and the sound arriving late, is another entirely.
Back at the house, the bar hosted a karaoke session that eventually became the sort of evening where nobody quite notices the time. New Year's Day brought the Saundersfoot swim again, just as atmospheric as the first time. The afternoon was spent in the Sky Room, the sea visible through the glass, meals appearing from the kitchen at intervals.
Two New Years. The same coastline, the same fireworks across the bay, the same house adapting itself around entirely different groups.
The practical details
Waterwynch House is available for exclusive hire over the Christmas and New Year period. The house sleeps up to 30 guests across 12 ensuite bedrooms. It is family-friendly and dog-friendly. Catering is flexible, from self-catering to private chef to working with one of our trusted local catering partners.
The house is 5-Star rated by Visit Wales.
A note on availability
Families who spend Christmas at Waterwynch often return, which means festive availability tends to go quickly.
Availability for Christmas and New Year 2026 can be checked using the link here.