Hotel Hit Squad: In times of chaos and uncertainty, The Newt provides a calming country escape
In the teeth of the chaos and uncertainty swirling about us, a new hotel has just opened. It’s on the edge of Bruton, that hotbed of trendy urban escapism, and, with its pleasure grounds, it feels like balm.
Whether you decide that The Newt is an earthly horticultural paradise or Disneyland for gardeners, it delights both eye and palate. While our country continues to be buffeted by Brexit, it made me want to hunker down: I would be very happy there.
Incorporating Palladian-fronted Hadspen House, first built in 1687, and its surrounding working estate, The Newt offers many unusual elements, all revealed only when its new gardens opened to the public last May. The centrepiece is Hadspen’s egg-shaped Parabola walled garden, now planted with a comprehensive collection of 460 trained British apple trees, of 267 varieties, arranged in a baroque-style maze.
And then there’s the cyder press, bottling plant and bar, mushroom house, History of Gardening Museum, farm shop, treetop walk, thatched ice-cream parlour and wild swimming ponds, not forgetting the newts (we’ll come to them), all of which make the hotel and its estate feel like a lively, cultured, kindly and well-orchestrated haven – much as our country should be.
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Reading the torrid headlines as I swung languidly in one of several hanging 'nest' chairs, I was reminded of Lorenzetti’s great 1338 fresco The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena. The scenes in Good Government portray contented, leisurely workers going about their bucolic tasks in a neat landscape of ploughed farmland, villas and castles, while Bad Government reveals a city of demolished houses and non-existent businesses, and two opposing forces squaring up to one another menacingly.
Here, I told myself as I surveyed the scene from my nest, is Good Government. As with other recently opened hotels such as Heckfield Place and Grantley Hall, immensely wealthy individuals have stepped in to restore a beautiful English country house and give it new life.
South African Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, who together also created Babylonstoren – hotel, winery and spectacular gardens – in the Cape Winelands, are long-standing anglophiles, and six years ago, leafing through Country Life, spotted Hadspen House, home for two centuries of the Hobhouse family, for sale. They were captivated and chose it as their home, but somehow could not resist repeating their work at Babylonstoren. As there, Koos concentrated on the garden with designer Patrice Taravella, while Karen, former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, turned her attention to the interiors.
There is plenty to admire in the resulting hotel, especially the simplicity: no curtains at the lovely sash windows, nor pointless cushions on the blissful beds; the rough-hewn walls of the natural, unadorned spa; the unfussy, almost Scandinavian style of the 23 bedrooms and bathrooms; the juxtaposition of modern and old. But there are odd choices too among the contemporary furniture, lighting and art. I longed for slouchy sofas in the drawing room, and the entrance hall/reception feels awkward with its Marmite statement faux-classical painting and vast double-sided sofa. But there are many pleasures.
Walking towards the lovely unadorned house of ravishing, burnished red-gold limestone, past a charming agglomeration of buildings – Clock House, Stable Yard, granary, kitchen garden, greenhouse and discreet spa and gym – feels like encountering a secret hamlet where time has stood still. Lunching brilliantly yet inexpensively on home-grown produce at the elevated, animated, all-glass Garden Café, with the gardens spread out below, was another highlight, as was the superb food for both dinner and breakfast in the hotel’s delightful inside-outside Botanical Rooms restaurant, whose dazzling yet homely open kitchen is its centrepiece.
For their quality, menus and wines are reasonably priced, as are the rooms, which include breakfast, afternoon tea, complimentary mini larder, garden tour, cyder tour (they make their own on site) and use of the spa.
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Talk about Good Government. No power-crazed politicians here. As for the staff, they are simply superlative and give me hope for the future of British hospitality: bright, professional-yet-delightful and palpably excited about the future of the benign realm in which they find themselves. Part of their remit is to protect the 2,000-strong colony of smooth, palmate, and most importantly, great crested newts that live here and gave their name to the hotel.
Doubles from £255 per night, including breakfast. Wheelchair access possible.
Read the full hotel review: The Newt
