Some things in life are planned. This wasn’t one of them.

Lodge Dinorwig sits above Llanberis, overlooking the lake and on the edge of Eryri (Snowdonia). It’s been our home, our business, and honestly our whole world since 2014. But the road that brought us here wound through Canada, France, a few festival fields, and a closed auction where we wrote a number on a piece of paper and hoped for the best.

This is that story.

Two people, very different starting points

Simon grew up down the road from Lodge Dinorwig. He was raised in these mountains, with the quarries and ridgelines of Eryri as his backyard. Hospitality was in the family too — his dad ran a hotel and was the chef, so feeding people and keeping a welcoming house was just part of how he grew up.

Sonni is from Berlin. She found her love of the outdoors travelling through Australia, Canada, and Europe, and somewhere along the way discovered that wild landscapes felt more like home than city ones.

We met in Canada in 2009, on a ski season, the way these things happen. We spent the next few years doing what people do when they’ve found someone to be adventurous with: more ski seasons in the French Alps, and summers selling strawberries and cream at festivals and agricultural shows across the UK. It was a good life. A really good one.

The seed of an idea

Running chalets in the Alps planted something in us. We loved the rhythm of it — feeding people at the start and end of their days, watching them head out into the mountains and come back tired and happy. There’s something about taking the faff of cooking off someone’s plate (literally) that frees them up to just be fully present on their holiday. We knew that feeling from the guest side too. We’d stayed in plenty of hostels and understood the value of a catered option — basic, affordable, but done with warmth.

When we eventually decided to spend more time in one place rather than following the seasons, North Wales was the obvious answer. Simon was from here. We knew the landscape. And then a friend spotted that an old school building overlooking Llanberis was for sale.

The auction

Here’s the part of the story that still makes us laugh.

The auction was the next day. We hadn’t seen inside the building. We had a look around the outside, wrote a number on a piece of paper for a closed-bid auction, and just hoped.

We got it.

We bought a £500 caravan, parked it in the car park, and that became home while we got stuck into the conversion. Ten months later, Lodge Dinorwig was a 14-bed, fully catered hostel with views across the lake that still stop us in our tracks. It was a huge amount of work. Looking back, we both agree: it was good to be naive. If we’d known exactly how much was involved, we might never have started. And that would have been a real shame.

Why a hostel, not a hotel or holiday let

We love the community of a hostel. There’s an energy to shared spaces that you just don’t get in more isolated accommodation. Guests who arrived as strangers end up sharing a table over dinner, swapping route recommendations, heading out the next morning in the same direction. It’s also more accessible, better for the environment, and more our kind of place.

The fully catered model made sense from everything we’d learned in the Alps. Breakfast included, packed lunches and homecooked dinners available, so guests can focus entirely on whatever brought them to Eryri in the first place.

The café chapter (and why it ended)

Early on, we decided to open to the public as a café. And it took off. Really took off — so much so that it started to overshadow the hostel side of things. For a while, we ran both.

Then Covid hit. When we came out the other side, finding staff was a genuine struggle, and we had to make a call. We closed the café and went all-in on the hostel.

It was the right decision. Completely.

How we know it’s working

Guests come back. And come back again. People who found Lodge Dinorwig for a mountain leadership course or a trail running weekend, and then just keep returning. That kind of loyalty is the loudest feedback we could ask for.

We set out to create a warm, welcoming place. Somewhere that feels like a home from home, with everything Eryri has to offer right outside the door. That’s exactly what Lodge Dinorwig has become.