Chewton Glen

The New Forest begins at the garden wall of Chewton Glen, and Christchurch Bay is a walk away through the trees at the bottom of the lawn. The house, a Georgian country house of red brick near New Milton in Hampshire, has been a hotel for six decades, and for most of that time it has been held up as the model English country-house hotel.

History

The house was built in the eighteenth century, and in the 1840s it belonged to George Marryat, whose brother Captain Frederick Marryat, the naval officer and novelist, stayed here and wrote The Children of the New Forest, published in 1847. Martin and Brigitte Skan bought the property in 1966, in a poor state, and over 40 years built it into a hotel that collected the leading awards of the trade, joined Relais & Châteaux and pioneered the hotel spa in Britain with a wing opened in 1990. The Skans sold in 2006 to the hotel group owned by Ian and Richard Livingstone's London & Regional Properties, which also owns Cliveden House and the Lygon Arms. The group added the treehouses in 2012 and the cookery school in 2017.

Architecture and design

The main house keeps its Georgian front and a sequence of panelled sitting rooms, the Sun Lounge and a bar, with bedrooms above and in later wings laid out around the gardens. The treehouses, designed to sit among the oaks of the valley below the house, stand on stilts with hot tubs on their decks and are reached by a path or by buggy. The spa building and indoor pool are joined to the house. Interiors are English country house in the old rooms, with chintz and antiques, and plainer timber and glass in the treehouses.

Rooms and suites

Chewton Glen has 72 rooms and suites, among them the Treehouse Suites, which have a kitchen and dining area with breakfast hampers delivered through a hatch, and a larger multi-bedroom treehouse for families or groups. In the house, the Marryat and Coach House suites are the largest. Many rooms have private terraces or balconies over the gardens.

Dining

The Dining Room, the main restaurant, serves a menu of British produce including vegetables from the hotel's walled kitchen garden and fish from the Solent. The Kitchen, opened in 2017 with the chef James Martin, is both a cookery school with a demonstration theatre and an informal restaurant open to the public. Afternoon tea is served in the lounges and on the terrace. The cellar runs to several thousand bins.

Wellness

The spa has a 17-metre indoor pool under a glass roof, a hydrotherapy pool, sauna, steam, treatment rooms, a gym with a dance studio and an outdoor pool for the summer. On the 130-acre estate there is a nine-hole par-three golf course, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, croquet and walking and cycling into the Forest.

Weddings and events

Chewton Glen hosts weddings in the house and gardens, with civil ceremonies in the licensed rooms and receptions in a marquee on the lawn or in the private dining rooms; the whole hotel can be taken for exclusive use. Several meeting rooms serve conferences and board meetings, and the Kitchen's theatre is used for team cookery events. The treehouses are often booked for wedding parties.

Location

New Milton is on the South Western main line, about 1 hour 45 minutes from London Waterloo; the hotel is five minutes from the station. Bournemouth Airport is 20 minutes away, Southampton 40 and Heathrow about two hours by road. The beach at Barton-on-Sea, the New Forest villages of Lymington and Beaulieu, and the ferry to the Isle of Wight at Lymington are all close. It is the long-established luxury hotel in Hampshire against which newer arrivals are measured.