Hotel Hit Squad: Inside the Suffolk hotel offering a digital detox for all the family
On our first morning at The Ickworth, I glanced up from a book to see my two children, Johnny (aged six) and Frida (three), staring intently at a miniature blackboard. “What are you doing?” I asked. “We’re pretending to watch TV,” answered my son, robotically. Maybe yours are less boorish? For our kids, however, the thrill of a hotel stay revolves exclusively around the duel miracles of buffet breakfasts (Coco Pops, pastries and pancakes!) and TVs in the bedroom. Stoke them with sugar at the former, then ban them from using the latter, and you have what the SAS term “a situation”. Yet somehow, we had signed a contract agreeing to do exactly that.
We were at The Ickworth in Suffolk to test the Luxury Family Hotel group’s “digital detox boxes”. Witnessing the rising ubiquity of screens for all ages, and judging – sagely – that cold turkey is much more doable when others are handling the cooking and housekeeping, they have rolled them out across all six of their boutique hotels. Families, including parents, sign a document pledging to go screen-free for a four-hour period during their stay before handing in their phones, tablets, Kindles etc, to receive in return a hamper of traditional fun, including binoculars, card games, story cubes, charades, juggling balls and a joke book.
No big deal, I thought. Yet as Johnny and Frida decompressed from Peppa Pig and Pokémon, I began to twitch over my next Twitter fix. Like the reforming smoker reduced to chewing on pencils, I found myself flicking feverishly through a folder detailing safety procedures and hotel facilities.
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We unpacked our retro games under the shadow of a Georgian rotunda, complete with Roman frieze. All this, however, appeared to be lost on my little barbarians.
“Look,” I said, “the Romans didn’t need TV, they had lots of outdoor fun.”
“That one is spearing his friend,” said Johnny.
The hotel, you see, is housed in the East Wing of Ickworth House, ancestral home of the Marquess of Bristol. The rest of the property is National Trust and our room overlooked the elegant, Capability Brown-designed gardens shared by the hotel and trust. So we gathered up binoculars, skipping rope and details of a scavenger hunt of the hotel grounds, and headed outside where the room’s TV was out of sight and soon out of everyone’s mind, too.
The Ickworth has been attracting legions of grateful families since it opened in 2002, peddling its magic formula of child-friendly luxury. Toddlers drag cuddly animals along its stately corridors, retrieved from hampers of well-loved, borrowable toys. In the lounge, a judicious mix of modern and antique décor braves the assaults of clambering youngsters with only minor scuffs.
At the Conservatory restaurant, waiters will smile indulgently should your toddler upturn her tea in protest at the iPad ban. At £10 for a halloumi ciabatta, you might be forgiven for feeling less forgiving, but everyone seemed inordinately relaxed. We were all in much the same boat, after all.
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Waiters hovered with drinks, and it would soon be time for our two hours of free daily childcare, during which we would be able to flop in the spa or read the paper, uninterrupted, by the fire. Later, an in-room listening service meant we could also leave the little ones to sleep while we ate a rather good duck confit at Frederick’s (candlelit and kid-free). Everything, in fact, is configured to make “a retreat in the company of kids” less oxymoronic.
But it is the hotel’s outdoor facilities that lift the digital detox above a twee gimmick. Undistracted by screens, we spent a whole afternoon having wholesome, good clean fun, the likes of which we last encountered on the pages of an Enid Blyton book. We splashed in the pool full of floats, explored the National Trust wing of the house (guests go free), rampaged through the adventure playground, played some truly embarrassing tennis, followed by croquet at a similar level of expertise, before borrowing bikes to discover lakes, walled gardens, trees perfect for climbing, dens and surly sheep.
No one asked for TV. And despite the fact that staff will discreetly hand phones back should adults want to cheat, no one was tempted to use hide and seek as a chance to check emails.
In fact, we decided to do the detox again the following day when, during an animated round of charades, an unfamiliar feeling of wellness washed over me. This is what weekends are for. Let me stay forever, Ickworth, and I’ll burn my phone (or at least switch to aeroplane mode on occasion).
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Family rooms from £190 B&B, sleeping four. There are two rooms adapted for guests with disabilities (though only one of these has a walk-in shower).
• Read the full review: The Ickworth, Suffolk
