A Family Business

The English Apple has played a vital role in the 80 year history of our business – and has inspired the name of our Lodges.

Apple Tree Lodges are part of our family-owned enterprise which originated as a small 120 acre apple farm in 1938, in this beautiful corner of Suffolk.  Over 20 different varieties of apples are still grown today in the family’s orchards surrounding our Lodges and golf courses.

Devora Peake, who first came to England in 1938 from the Middle East, and her second husband Bill Peake, expanded their original, small apple farm over the next 30 years or so into a thriving, diverse enterprise.  Both were courageous entrepreneurs, and were perhaps best known for inventing Copella apple juice in their farmhouse kitchen in 1969.  Copella (named after Cox’s Orange Pippin apples and Carmella their youngest daughter) became a national brand leader for freshly pressed juice and was eventually sold by the family to Tropicana in 1997, but is still based on their farm in Suffolk, and still presses apples from the Peake family’s orchards.

Bill and Devora gradually increased the overall size of their estate from 120 to 900 acres and then created Stoke by Nayland Golf Club with two championship courses in the 1970s. They went through some very tough times along the way, but never wavered from their passion and dedication for providing healthy, top-quality products and facilities for their customers to enjoy.

Now a second and third-generation family business, which has expanded substantially since 2000, it continues to thrive with the help of an excellent team of almost 600 staff. The award-winning Boxford Group now includes Stoke by Nayland Resort, Apple Tree Lodges, Boxford (Suffolk) Farms, which grows apples, cherries, soft fruit and asparagus, and Peake Fruit, which is a fruit packhouse, storage and marketing business.

Devora and Bill’s eldest daughter Susanna Rendall is the Boxford Group Managing Director and with her on the Group Board and working in the various businesses are her sisters Tamara Unwin and Carmella Meyer, her brother Jonathan Loshak and her son Robert Rendall.  The family is proud to be continuing and growing the legacy that Bill and Devora created.