We do not hold a liquor licence

What a liquor licence actually is

The house is not a licensed premises and nobody here holds a licence to sell alcohol. That is a real permission granted by the State and it is not something a guest house acquires by wanting to. What it means in practice is simple and it is not a problem: you buy the drink, or your caterer does, and there is no bar tab, no corkage and nothing sold on the premises.

A licence to sell alcohol is issued by the State, it is earned through an application and an inspection, and it belongs to a specific premises rather than to a building's owner in general. A guest house does not acquire one by describing itself well, and this site's whole approach to anything of that kind is to say plainly that the house holds none of it, rather than to write a sentence vague enough to leave the question open.

What it means for an ordinary stay

Guests in any apartment may keep and drink what they bring for themselves, exactly as in a rented flat; nothing about a licence bears on that, because nobody is selling anything to anybody. The question only becomes real when the house is hosting an occasion where drink is served to a wider group than the people who brought it — a wedding, a party, an offsite with an evening reception.

The distinction is scale rather than the drink itself. Two guests sharing a bottle of wine with their own dinner in the garden apartment are doing exactly what they would do in a rented flat anywhere else, and no licence question arises. A hundred guests at a reception, served from a table by staff working the room, is the shape of activity a licence exists to regulate — and it is also the shape this house was never going to be able to hold in the first place, which is why the boundary matters most on the one kind of booking that could otherwise be mistaken for a licensed venue.

What it means for an event

The house is not a licensed venue and it does not hold a liquor licence, so drink is brought in by you or by your caterer and served by them. Nobody here can conduct a marriage. Music goes off at ten because of the neighbours, and that is a rule rather than a preference.

In practice that means the couple, the family, or their caterer buys the drink and pours it. There is no bar tab running on the house's account, no corkage charged for bringing your own bottle, and nothing sold across a counter anywhere in the building. A small wedding and a family gathering both explain how a caterer typically works inside that arrangement.

Most caterers who take on a private event like this already have their own arrangements for handling alcohol they have been asked to serve, and that arrangement is between the couple or family and the caterer, not something this house administers or takes a cut of. The house's part in it is limited to the building and the garden being available for whoever is doing the serving to use — a table to set up on, a kitchen to keep bottles cold in, and nothing more official than that.

What this does not stop the house doing

The ceremony can still happen in the garden or the parlour, the meal can still be cooked in either kitchen and served at the long table, and the toast can still be made — somebody simply supplies and pours the glass rather than the house. Every kind of event this house takes is built around what the building can actually offer, and this is the one thing, named plainly, that it cannot. A couple planning a day here loses nothing about how the day feels; they simply arrange one more thing themselves, in the same way they would arrange flowers or music, rather than assuming it comes with the building.