%402x%20(5).svg){kind=icon}
%402x%20(5).svg){kind=icon}
The Briers has nine bedrooms across two floors, and every one of them has its own bathroom. Nobody shares, and nobody ends up on a sofa bed.
Two ground-floor rooms have king-size beds and walk-in showers, with no stairs to climb. Room Seven is the family room, with a double and bunk beds, sleeping four. There are two twins, two rooms with a double and a single, and two further kings, one of them newly decorated with a freestanding bath beside the bed.
Take the whole house at a weekend and all nine are yours, sleeping up to 22. Sunday to Thursday they are sold individually from £89 a night, room only with tea and coffee in the room, and a door code sent to you on the morning you arrive. Room guests can use the snug; the bar, dining room, kitchens, hot tubs and sauna are for whole-house bookings only.
A commercial kitchen for professional catering (bring your own chef), plus a homely kitchen with dishwasher, cooker, microwave and everything you need.
Feeding 22 people is a serious undertaking, so most groups do some combination of cooking, a hired chef and eating out. Newcastle is five minutes down the road for the nights nobody feels like it.
The kitchens are part of whole-house hire only. Room stays are room only, with tea and coffee in the room, and Newcastle's restaurants and takeaways are five minutes away. See our Food & Drink page.
The bar and the dining room at The Briers are one open-plan space rather than two. A licensed bar with stools along one side, tables and chairs along the other, and a serving counter at the far end.
It means the group stays together. Nobody is stuck in a dining room while the conversation is happening somewhere else, and the room works as easily for a long lunch as it does at eleven at night.
Yours entirely on a whole-house weekend.
The bar at The Briers is licensed, but you stock it yourself. Bring what your group actually drinks, at supermarket prices rather than bar prices, and pour your own.
Over a weekend with a group of any size that difference adds up to more than most people expect — and nobody has to watch the clock or find a taxi home.
It sits in the same open-plan room as the dining tables, so the bar is where the evening happens rather than somewhere people drift off to. The snug is next door with a TV for whatever is on.
Part of whole-house hire.
Every group has somebody who wants an hour away from the group, and somebody else who wants to watch the match. The snug is that room: exposed stone, comfortable chairs, a TV, and a door.
It sits next to the bar, so nobody is far from the conversation if they want to rejoin it.
The snug is the one shared room open to every guest, including room guests Sunday to Thursday. The TV has Netflix, Sky Sports and Sky Movies. The bar, dining room, kitchens, hot tubs and sauna are for whole-house bookings only.
There are two hot tubs and a barrel sauna in the garden, enough that a group does not have to take turns, and useful after a day on the hill or eighteen holes into the wind. The hot tubs and sauna are for whole-house bookings only.
The Briers sits in its own grounds on Middle Tollymore Road, in open countryside rather than on a street. Slieve Donard is four kilometres away and Tollymore Forest Park is under two.
There is outdoor seating for the evenings that allow it, and free parking for as many cars as your group arrives in, including space for a minibus.
Dogs are welcome, and the walking starts more or less at the gate.
Ready January 2027. The photographs here are indicative, taken at our sister house The Brambles — they show the kind of space being built, not the finished room at The Briers. Our own photography will follow once it is done.
A proper living room with sofas — somewhere to fall into after a day on the hill, and the part of the evening that happens once people drift back from the bar.
It fills the one real gap in the house: at the moment the snug is the only soft seating, and a group of twenty-two needs more than one room to spread into.
Part of whole-house hire.
