A team retreat for a small team: the whole grounds instead of a conference room

A typical retreat for a small team looks like this: a hotel outside the city, a room with a projector, dinner in a restaurant with other groups at the neighbouring tables, and an evening in a bar where it is hard to talk. It costs a lot, and everyone comes back feeling it was a company meeting in a different building.

The alternative: grounds where, apart from you, there is nobody.

What you get

Both cabins, up to 8 people with an overnight stay. Four people per cabin, each with its own hot tub with jacuzzi and its own Finnish sauna, both with no time limit.

A covered shelter for around 20 people. That is the space for the common part: a debrief, a workshop, dinner, the outdoor cinema. It also works when it rains, which matters for a trip planned three months in advance.

The whole grounds to yourselves. Group stays always cover renting both cabins, so there are no random guests on site. Nobody disturbs you and you disturb nobody, which for a team that wants to loosen up is a condition, not a convenience.

Starlink. Satellite internet that programmers and video editors work on here. If the trip combines team time with work, the link will take it.

The rest of the infrastructure: two gas grills, two bonfire spots, four bikes, four SUP boards, volleyball, badminton, football, a 4K outdoor cinema, and at Domek Marzeń a stocked fishing pond.

Home cooking to order, 60 zł per person per night for each meal, cooked on site. With a group that is a real convenience: nobody drives off at lunchtime.

What you do not get

Here it pays to be very specific, because this decides whether this is the place for you.

There is no conference room. There is the shelter and the common areas in the cabins. That is enough for a conversation, a workshop and a debrief, but there is no projector for presentations, no flipcharts, no whiteboard and no U-shape seating.

There is no staff and no corporate catering. There is home cooking from my mum, ordered in advance, not a catering company with a banquet menu.

There is no team-building programme. We do not run activities, we have no entertainers, we do not organise team games. We provide the grounds and the infrastructure, the rest you do yourselves or with an external facilitator you bring along.

There is no 24h reception. We are on the phone, but nobody sits in a booth at the entrance.

There is no room for 50 people. Eight people with an overnight stay is the ceiling, around twenty under the shelter without sleeping over.

If you are looking for a conference hotel with full service, that is not us, and it is better to know that now.

What kind of team it works for

For teams of up to eight people, which in practice means small companies, a single department or a founding group.

It works particularly well for:

• A strategy session or annual planning, where the point is the conversation, not the presentations
• A retreat for a distributed team that normally works remotely and meets once a quarter
• A retrospective or a project wrap-up, where you need calm, not attractions
• A week of working remotely together, where the team-building happens along the way

It does not work for large events, trainings that need a room and equipment, or trips whose goal is an entertainment programme.

A sample two-night flow

Day one, afternoon. Arrival, splitting up between the cabins, coffee under the shelter. Check-in starts at 3 pm.

Evening. Grill, bonfire. No agenda. This is the moment for people to loosen up before you start discussing anything.

Day two, before noon. The actual working part under the shelter or in a cabin. Breakfast at a time agreed earlier, no rigid hour.

Afternoon. Activity: volleyball, SUPs on the pond, bikes. Or the conversation continues, if it is going well.

Evening. Hot tubs and saunas, one per cabin, so the group can use them in parallel with no queue. Dinner, the outdoor cinema.

Day three. Breakfast, wrap-up, check-out at 11 am.

Dates and pricing

Midweek is best, Sunday to Thursday. Quieter, cheaper and much easier to find a free date than at weekends, which fill up with individual bookings anyway.

Renting the whole grounds is 2000 zł per night for both cabins and the entire terrain. What comes on top depends on the details: the number of people, the food and any participants without an overnight stay, so we settle the final amount together after a conversation.

The minimum stay is 2 nights. We issue invoices, just mention it when booking. For group bookings we ask for a card as security.

Write via the contact page or have a look at the companies page. I reply by the end of the day at the latest.

One thing worth thinking about early

An eight-person team in two cabins means someone has to decide who shares with whom. It sounds trivial and regularly turns out to be the touchiest part of the organisation.

It is worth settling before the trip, not in the car park after arrival.

The second thing: two bikes per cabin, so with eight people there are four bikes. Same with the SUP boards. Worth knowing when planning activities.

What next

See the companies page, check the rules for renting the whole grounds or write to us to settle the date and the price. If the trip is meant to include work, have a look at the piece on a workation with Starlink.