OTROČINĚVES, CENTRAL BOHEMIA

Míťa Castle-Kaněrová's new life started as a promise to her cat.

In 2003, she had just moved back to the Czech Republic after spending more than 30 years in the United Kingdom. Castle-Kaněrová was living a quiet, retired life in a small Prague 7 apartment with the longhaired, black cat, Kristynka, whom she discovered in Wales on Christmas Eve years before.

"And I kept saying, 'Just wait, one day we'll have a house and a garden,' " recalls the 57-year-old, who sports short brown hair and a wide, easy smile. "That's how the idea of a guesthouse was born."

That's also how an entrepreneur was born. Castle-Kaněrová is the owner of Village House, a six-bedroom luxury guesthouse in Otročiněves, a village of just under 500 people about an hour outside of Prague by train.

The former academic spent more than a year and her entire life savings renovating the dilapidated farm building that once stood here into an upscale bed-and-breakfast she hopes will find a market with both tourists and international businesses looking for a space for training or team building sessions.

Opened in May, Village House is a first shot at business for a woman who has spent the majority of her career in academia. And, despite having a clear vision for the venture and confidence in her instincts, it is also a huge risk.

"I'll be 58. It's rather old to be starting a new life." Castle-Kaněrová says, standing in the sunny dining room of Village House, where an immense darkwood chest holds the gold emblazoned dining set she inherited from her mother. "I've never done anything like this. I've always been very careful. It's a big risk."

'It was unbelievable'

The former working farm that's over a century old sits inconspicuously behind a dark brown, remote-controlled gate a little outside the center of Otročiněves. The shape of the original building is the only resemblance it bears to the wreck Castle-Kaněrová discovered in 2004.

What once was a crumbling roof is a renewed tile construction with skylights. Floors that were covered in dust and rubble now feature clean white Italian tiles. Wide glass doors that open into a spacious, airy den with rows of bookshelves and an antique piano line the back of the 30-meter-long (99 feet) building.

Several things attracted this new hotelier to the building, but, ultimately, it was the garden out back, where a lone cherry tree grows at the end of a long green field, that sold her.

When she found the place, a little old man was living alone in the front room. He was one of four owners.

Castle-Kaněrová spent months negotiating with them. They doubled the price, to 1.8 million Kč ($81,000), when they saw Castle-Kaněrová drive up in her British-registered car and kept holding out for more money. At one point, she withdrew her offer because, as she put it, "they were playing silly."

But she didn't want to give up the space, so she asked all the owners to agree to meet together, something they'd never done before.

"Let's all get together and see what happens," Castle-Kaněrová thought at the time. "So we had a cup of tea and made an agreement. It was unbelievable."

It took a year to get the planning permission and architectural plan to begin renovation and then another year to complete it. Though many of her friends said it would be cheaper to tear the building down and start from scratch, Castle-Kaněrová and her architect, Jiří Hušek of AI-Design, were committed to keep as much of the structure as possible.

"We wanted to keep everything we could," Hušek said.

They stuck to the plan. Today, all the ceiling beams in Village House are original.

Transforming Village House was a tutorial in Czech bureaucracy. For instance, the planning office had 30 days to approve the initial renovation application. It waited until the final day to review the document and then called to say it had a problem. Castle-Kaněrová had to start over.

Turning the building into a business has been even more Kafkaesque. Castle-Kaněrová bought the house as a private individual and then created an s.r.o, or limited-liability company, which took only a month. But then she had to create a formal legal agreement with the s.r.o allowing her to renovate. Once the renovation was finished, she had to draft an agreement with her company that would allow her to live there. Today, she pays herself rent.

Things got so bad, Castle-Kaněrová's friends told her to start folding bills into officials' hands. "I said 'No way. I'm not going to bribe anybody,' " she says.

Village House has nevertheless been a huge investment. The determined entrepreneur won't say how much the renovation cost, but admits she spent all of her savings and sold a flat in Hampstead, England, to finance it. She wouldn't take out a bank loan for fear of not being able to make the payments and, like many small businesses in the Czech Republic that hope to qualify for European Union Structural Funds, hers did not.

"I robbed my dear daughter of all the family savings and invested it here," she says. "Some people said I'm mad, that it doesn't make much sense."

'What are you doing here?'

In 1968, Castle-Kaněrová, who grew up near Karlovy Vary, went on holiday in England and stayed for 35 years.

After Soviet troops invaded her homeland on Aug. 21 of that year to put down the Prague Spring, she was declared a student activist, thrown out of the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University and sentenced to 15 months in jail in absentia.

Castle-Kaněrová never intended to become a dissident, but she found herself stranded alone in England with almost no knowledge of the language. To survive, she found a job as an au pair.

She eventually finished her graduate studies in Soviet and Eastern European Studies in Glasgow, Scotland, and forged a career in academia. For 16 years, she taught history and social policy at the University of North London.

She married a fellow lecturer in 1974, hence the Castle in her last name. Her daughter, Zoya, was born three years later.

History dealt her a wild card for the second time on Nov. 20, 1989, three days after the start of the Velvet Revolution.

"I went back to my classroom the Monday after, and they said 'What are you doing here? You should go. We can do without you for a few days.' "

Castle-Kaněrová got on a plane two weeks later and returned home "to soak up the 1989 atmosphere."

"My homecoming began there, and it took another 10 years to really make it happen."

When she returned to Prague, she'd had enough of teaching. She'd also tried government contracting work and intergovernmental work with the Czech Roma community, but she wanted something different.

"I went from the top working with government to the really grassroots level," she says, adding that she thought: "I don't know what to do next.'"

She needed to find a base, something that would allow her to combine both the British and Czech parts of her life. Village House came out of that — and, of course, the promise to Kristynka.

"I want to give something back," she says. "I've been away 30 years, and I thought 'this is an opportunity to bring a bit of a different culture."

'Following my own instincts'

Castle-Kaněrová is not a natural at business.

She referred to turnover as "or whatever you call it" and doesn't have a business plan. The prices at Village House — 1,200 Kč a night for a single room, 2,100 Kč for a double — are based on a rough estimate of costs.

But she does have vision. When Castle-Kaněrová first started popping up at American Chamber of Commerce meetings — she's also a member of the Irish and English chambers — a little over a year ago, her idea for Village House was clear: an upscale guest house for upscale clientele.

She is also an impressive networker who began throwing events at Village House last year to get her name out. President Václav Klaus and the Irish ambassador ended up attending a ceremony she held celebrating the millennium of Otročiněves last year.

In terms of her target market, the focus is on businesses first, specialized tours themed around Celtic history — Otročiněves is three kilometers (two miles) from one of the country's largest Celtic sites — and tourists last.

Village House had its first customers in May. Two companies, CA IB Corporate Finance and Avant Advertising, found its Web site, www.villagehouse.cz, and booked the entire house for two separate weekend training sessions.

Both groups started out a bit stiff, she recalls, but when they were readying to leave "they could see everything they couldn't see before. They started noticing the environment, and they said goodbye like we were longstanding friends."

Things have slowed down since, but there are plans to launch a flyer campaign in the United Kingdom and possibly even bring on a partner to help finance construction of a sauna and a pool.

For now, at least, the future of Village House is in a state of fluid dynamics.