Hell is other people

The one thing you know when you buy a holiday home is that you are going to make lots of new friends who will all want to borrow your nice home in August. Their request will be awkward, the rent conversations tricky, and their bad habits a source of irritation when your woman what does tells you what they did. They could turn out to be friends that you really don't want to see again.

As a holiday-home owner I can tell you that people on holiday behave in the strangest ways. It's as if on leaving home they enter another world with a set of rules that don't apply in their own houses and flats. Even old friends can prove to be possessed of the most curious habits. At worst, guests can be slovenly and devious.

Take the case of two wealthy families, the Hoods and the Willetts, in which the former agreed to let the latter stay in their luxury holiday villa near Cannes.

The Hoods alleged that the deal hinged on Sarah Willetts, an artist, donating paintings in exchange for rent. However, the Willetts believed the Hoods would buy two paintings at a reduced rate. This is where the trouble started and, as things degenerated, the Hoods accused the Willetts of using the wrong bedroom and blocking the sink. Then Mrs Willetts sued the Hoods for the return of the paintings, claiming they had failed to honour a contract to buy them. It seemed impossible to sort out over a glass of wine and lawyers were called. Now, with the case declared a draw - the Hoods keep one painting and Mrs Willetts gets one back - the friendship is in tatters.

In my own experience it is the paying guests who can land the biggest shocks. I took a call one day from the housekeeper of our Suffolk house, who was in floods of tears. A group of friends had left floors strewn with beer cans and broken glasses, the kitchen awash with Chinese takeaway cartons, bedding pulled from beds and flung over sofas and doors scrawled with obscene graffiti. But this was no stag party running riot, it was a 60th birthday celebration. Our agent successfully pursued them through the small-claims court for damages.

For Londoner Joy Law, who owns a place in the Dordogne, it was the little things: "People move furniture, which is fine, because they're just making themselves at home. But they don't put it back, so I don't know where anything is."

The larder is another potential battleground. Says Joy: "I don't mind people using the last tin in the cupboard, it's rarely essential, but when they use the last of the salt it can be maddening. Using the last loo roll is unforgivable."

North Londoner Gilly Cambridge has a holiday home in Dorset and had a particularly bad experience with one set of guests at New Year. "They broke the leg of the TV table and propped it up expecting I wouldn't notice." But worst of all was the discovery of New Year supper in February. "Someone had vomited on the cushions and then turned them over. We didn't discover the evidence for at least a month and by then it was indescribably horrible." She's now also been warned off people bringing dogs to stay: "I was perfectly happy at first, but so many dogs seem to be incontinent. The parquet is not what it used to be."

The most outlandish story of guest ghastliness is that of a couple who swapped houses with an American family. They returned to find their carefully nurtured and precision-trimmed box hedge transformed into a topiary duck.

"Of course one troublesome letting is one too many, but the number of sorry incidents is very small," says David Spenley of The Holiday Cottages Group, which has more than 8,500 cottages. "We advise owners to provide good-quality but robust and practical interiors, and make sure sofas have washable covers."