Domaine de La Tannerie Chambres d'hôtes et Appartements

My family and I stayed at Domaine De La Tannerie for four nights towards the end of August, having picked it largely on the basis of strong Tripadvisor reviews. We stayed with another family - friends of ours - so we had four adults and four children in total in our group. I'm keen to set the context for my review as I feel it would be a different review had we been staying as a couple for example. The Tannerie itself is really lovely. The building is very nice and the pool area and grounds are very pleasant and well maintained. The rooms are well kept and clean and very much as they appear in the photos on the website and on ***********, if not a little better. The location is excellent. It’s a perfect base for exploring the immediate area and it’s only a short walk from the centre of Prades which offers shops, restaurants and cafes. For us, the element that negatively impacted our stay was the owner. I wish to be clear that in some ways he was definitely helpful. For example he was forthcoming with good advice on what we could do locally in the region. But whilst he was most certainly not rude in any way we just all felt like we weren't made to feel at all welcome. We arrived on our first day on a very hot day. I had actually messaged the owner via *********** (admittedly a good few weeks prior) to advise that our flight was quite early and that we would probably be arriving between 11 and 12. I asked whether an early check-in might be possible to which I received a reply to say that would be okay. We arrived shortly before 11am to find a sign on the door with a phone number which I rang. The owner replied and seemed completely surprised that we were there. He then came to the door and told us the check-in was not until 3 pm. After a long journey and in the heat of the day we were hoping we might be able to use the pool area while we waited for the room to be available but he told us that this was not possible. He said we could leave our bags but we needed to go elsewhere and come back at 3 o’clock. We did not know the area at all so wondered aimlessly up into the town and literally sat in a café before returning at 3 where he greeted us and showed us to our room. He really overly laboured the point that most of his guests were older repeat customers, that the pool area was a very quiet, calm area and that our children had to be quiet and respectful. Given we had booked a family room we thought this was a little bit excessive. Add that to our first contact that morning and as a start it just didn’t set a particularly good tone for the stay. A build up of lots of little things over the next four days combined to ensure that the tone never really improved. The cover was often on the pool in the morning. I noted that it was still on at 9:30 one day and we didn’t feel like we should need to go and ask to have it removed to have a morning swim so I ended up not swimming. There is a hot tub area which remained covered and closed up the entire d