Hotel Hit Squad: Artistry meets flop-down homeliness at long-awaited Heckfield Place
Like the water lilies on its two lakes that unfurl in the afternoon sun, a new country house hotel has this week elegantly blossomed. After a six-year delay, Heckfield Place has finally arrived, looking and feeling fully formed: lovely, natural and already mature.
There’s nowhere quite like Heckfield Place – show-stopping, but not show-off. A sybaritic spa and infinity pool will open next year but, for now, you can swim wild in the lake, walk, cycle and picnic in the woods and wander around the hotel’s biodynamic greenhouses, market garden and farm.
Hotel-watchers, like me, had got fed up with Heckfield Place. Owned by American-based billionaire Gerald Chan, it was originally slated to spring to life in 2012, but its due date kept being pushed back as a string of high-profile managers and chefs came and went. Shrouded in mystery, there was dark talk among locals as to the estate’s real purpose.
As it turns out, the reason for the delay is also the reason for the allure: despite the undisclosed millions lavished on it, Chan felt it simply wasn’t right until now. Few new hotels have the luxury of time: this one did.
Key to getting it right was the advent, three years ago, of interior designer Ben Thompson, a young protégé of Ilse Crawford. The Georgian mansion had been going down the international, could-be-anywhere route, but Thompson’s intervention has instead created something rather magical. Surveying 400 landscaped acres of Hampshire countryside – woodland, gardens, lakes, farm, follies – the buildings feel connected to their surroundings.
There’s a sense of warmth, naturalness and flop-down homeliness that’s also artistic (fine 20th-century English pictures from Chan’s private collection); literary (a curated collection of books in the Morning Room and bedrooms); earthy and artisanal (lime plaster walls in natural colours, linens, English oak floors, hand-crafted furniture, headboards and matting woven from sweet-smelling river Ouse rush).
There are Persian rugs everywhere, including along the superbly lit corridors, splendid original fireplaces, charming floral designs by Kitten Grayson, a wall of riveting mid-20th-century photographs; corn dollies for “Do not disturb” signs, cocktails based on ingredients from the estate, bath and spa products inspired by the 18th-century horticulturalist William Wildsmith, who created an arboretum here; and many other intelligent and surprising touches, not least the glamorous screening room and programme of Soho House-style curated talks and workshops. The current small spa is cosseting.
Perhaps afternoon tea best personifies Heckfield Place. Forget those awful tiered cake stands, bitty sandwiches and poncy petits fours.
• Hotel Hit Squad: 'Save me from quirky, please – at least when devised by committee'
Here are the finest leaf teas from the Rare Tea Company, perhaps a whole ginger cake from which to cut yourself a wedge, a dish of sliced peaches, great knobbly home-made scones, a big bowl of cream. Almost all of what you eat comes straight from the farm.
The full-bodied food is from Skye Gyngell and it is as natural, authentic and delicious as you would expect from the creator of Petersham Nurseries and Spring, as are the wonderful, eclectic wines. We were joined in Marle restaurant (there is also Hearth, for grilling over fire) by “Miss Catherine”, our children’s favourite teacher from way back when, and her husband, who now happen to live close to the hotel. Thumbs up from them, but for one jarring note.
The ludicrous black, white and grey front-of-house uniforms are meant to be quirky takes on Julie Christie’s costumes in the original Far from the Madding Crowd. “More like The Handmaid’s Tale,” said Miss Catherine, and we all shuddered in agreement.
I have a much better idea for the uniforms. Get the girls to dress like Olivia Richli, Heckfield’s stylish general manager, whose first UK hotel this is, after many years in the Far East and Venice with Aman. Unlike her staff, she looked entirely natural with her flowing blonde tresses, sneakers, cropped trousers and ethnic tunic.
The cost of the 39 lovely rooms, which includes breakfast and afternoon tea, is roughly in line with the likes of Lime Wood, Soho Farmhouse or Babington, starting at £350 and rising to £1,000. But there are also six signature suites whose prices, from £1,750 to £10,000 a night (no, that’s not a misprint) make me feel queasy. Is accommodation at these prices right for a laid-back English country house hotel? Lovely though they are, these rooms veer towards the pretentiousness which in all other respects Mr Chan has avoided. It certainly differentiates the hotel and one thing is certain: there is nowhere quite like Heckfield Place.
Doubles from £350, including breakfast; wheelchair access
