Gravetye Manor

Over the entrance porch of Gravetye Manor, near West Hoathly in West Sussex, the initials R and K are carved in stone for Richard Infield and Katharine Compton, the couple for whom the house was built in 1598. The Infields were ironmasters, and the house they left is a sandstone manor of mullioned windows and tall chimneys, with oak panelling and stone fireplaces inside. It has been a hotel since 1958 and a garden of national importance for far longer.

History

William Robinson bought Gravetye and roughly a thousand acres around it in 1884. He had already published The Wild Garden in 1870 and The English Flower Garden in 1883, books that argued against Victorian bedding schemes and for hardy plants grown in natural drifts. Gravetye became the proving ground for those ideas. Robinson lived here until his death in 1935 at the age of 96 and left the estate to the Forestry Commission. In 1958 Peter Herbert took the house and opened it as a hotel, which he ran for nearly fifty years and made one of the earliest British members of Relais & Châteaux. Jeremy and Elizabeth Hosking bought Gravetye in 2010 and have since restored both the house and the gardens, which are led by the head gardener Tom Coward.

Architecture and design

The manor keeps its Elizabethan plan: a central hall, panelled rooms on either side, bedrooms above. Seventeenth-century fireplaces and plaster ceilings survive in the main rooms, and the furniture is antique rather than reproduction. The one modern addition of note is the restaurant, opened in 2018, a dining room with glass walls on three sides that sits in the garden rather than looking at it from a distance.

Rooms and suites

The house has 17 bedrooms, each named after a tree. The rooms on the first floor of the old house have the best of the panelling and the views over the flower garden and the lake below; those in the roof are smaller and quieter. Bathrooms were rebuilt in the Hoskings' restoration. There are no outbuildings or cottages: everyone sleeps under the manor's own roof.

Dining

The restaurant holds a Michelin star under the head chef George Blogg. His menus lean on the walled kitchen garden, an oval enclosure of about an acre and a half on the slope above the house which Robinson laid out and which now supplies vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers through most of the year. Lunch and dinner are served in the glass-walled dining room; tea is taken in the panelled sitting rooms or on the terrace.

Weddings and events

Gravetye is licensed for civil ceremonies and takes weddings on an exclusive-use basis, with the ceremony in the house or the gardens and dinner in the restaurant. The sitting rooms serve for small private meetings. With 17 bedrooms, the house suits a wedding party that stays together rather than a large reception.

Location

Gravetye sits in its own woodland south of East Grinstead, on the edge of Ashdown Forest. Gatwick Airport is about twenty minutes by car and Three Bridges station, on the London Victoria line, is a similar distance. Wakehurst, Kew's garden in Sussex, and the Bluebell Railway are both close by. For many visitors the gardens are the reason to come: the flower garden below the house, the wild garden on the slopes, the meadows and the lake Robinson dug, and a luxury hotel in West Sussex that happens to be attached to them.