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'I was working as a financial adviser, and getting there was taking me between an hour and a half and two hours. At the end of the day I'd arrive home exhausted, and our children - then aged three and six months - would already be in bed. I was only seeing them at weekends, and it wasn't enough.

'I could imagine only too well how I could be doing this for the rest of my working life - travelling day in, day out along that bit of train line into London. It was frightening - I was being sucked into the rat race and I knew it wasn't what I wanted.'

Kevin and his wife, Morag Cleland, used to dream of getting away from it all - permanently. Italy was the country they decided they'd like to move to: Morag spoke fluent Italian and had lived there as a teenager, and the couple took frequent holidays there and loved it.

'When we were visiting Italy we'd dream of moving out there: we'd talk about setting up a hotel. We'd sit in some Italian cafe talking about it, and then we'd have to go home and it would be back to the grindstone.'

Many couples spend their holidays hatching plans to escape the humdrum routines they feel trapped into back home: what sets Kevin and Morag apart is that, three and a half years ago, they did indeed get out.

'We just literally did it: I gave in my notice at work, and Morag, who was working as a psychotherapist, gave in hers. Doing it actually wasn't that scary, because we'd known for so long it was what we wanted. We piled everything into our car and drove to Italy - and I remember how liberating it felt, to be driving out of rainy England and into sunny Tuscany,' says Kevin.

In Italy, the family first stayed with friends of Morag, before finding a place of their own. 'Our idea was that we could teach English, so we knew at least we'd be able to support ourselves,' says Kevin. 'But obviously we had this dream, too, of setting up the hotel. It seemed so right for us: I'd worked in the past as a chef at the Dorchester and in catering, and we'd also worked together for a time, so we knew we could do it.

'We were also aware, because we were now parents with young children, that there was a dearth of good-quality accommodation aimed at this section of the market, so we thought we could put together a place that would provide what young families wanted.' The plan came together when Kevin and Morag heard of a property called Villa Pia, a large 18th-century house just outside a medieval hilltop village on the Umbria-Tuscany border. 'We went to see it, and just fell in love with it,' remembers Kevin. 'It was so perfect, everything we'd wanted. We knew it could provide us with the home we craved and also allow us to set up our hotel.'

Today, home for Kevin, 41, Morag, 38, and their children Callum, seven, and Ellie, four, is the top floor of Villa Pia. Downstairs they run their 13-bedroom hotel

'I think some of our guests are a bit envious of what we've done,' says Kevin. 'They say things like 'you were so brave'. But it didn't really seem brave to us. We were confident in ourselves that things would work out, and I think that's important. But we also created our own opportunity, and I think that's very much how life is. And the other essential element, of course, is luck: we really were very lucky to find Villa Pia and to manage to buy it.