Heckfield Place

Four hundred acres of Hampshire woodland, lakes and farmland surround Heckfield Place, a Georgian house outside the village of Heckfield that reopened in September 2018 after a restoration lasting more than a decade. The owner, the Hong Kong investor Gerald Chan, bought the estate in 2003 and let the project run until every detail suited him. The result is a private country house rather than a country house hotel in the usual sense: no reception desk, no lobby, a drawing room where guests help themselves to tea.

History

The house was built in the 1760s as a family home and enlarged in the nineteenth century, when its head gardener, William Wildsmith, made the grounds well known among Victorian plantsmen. For much of the twentieth century it lost that private character and served as a corporate training centre, with the institutional corridors that use implies. Chan's purchase in 2003 began a reconstruction that stripped out those additions, rebuilt the service wings and brought the estate's own farm back into production. The opening was postponed several times before the first guests arrived in autumn 2018.

Architecture and design

Ben Thompson, formerly of Ilse Crawford's Studioilse, designed the interiors. He kept the Georgian proportions and dressed them with oak, linen, hand-thrown ceramics and furniture made for the house, most of it in muted greens and browns that defer to the park outside. Pieces from Chan's own art collection hang in the corridors and sitting rooms. The Assembly, a new building beside the house, holds a cinema, a bar and a hall used for talks, screenings and concerts. The Long Room, the Morning Room and the library serve as the daytime living rooms of the house.

Rooms and suites

There are 45 rooms and suites, spread between the main house and the converted outbuildings. Beds are dressed in linen, bathrooms are stone and brass, and the minibars hold produce from the estate rather than branded miniatures. Rooms in the main house look over the lawns towards the lakes; the larger suites occupy the corners of the first floor, with sitting rooms and open fires.

Dining

Skye Gyngell, the Australian-born chef behind Spring in London, is the culinary director. The main dining room, Marle, serves her produce-led cooking through the day. Hearth, a smaller candlelit room built around an open fire, cooks a set menu in the evenings. Both draw on Home Farm, the estate's biodynamic market garden and dairy, which holds Demeter certification and is run by Jane Scotter, founder of Fern Verrow in Herefordshire. Bread, butter, honey and most of the vegetables on the menus come from within the estate walls.

Wellness

The Bothy, the estate's wellness building, opened in 2022 in a converted range of outbuildings and gardens. Treatments use Wildsmith Skin, the skincare line created at Heckfield and named after the Victorian head gardener. There are treatment rooms, a gym, and classes that use the woods and lakes as much as the indoor spaces.

Weddings and events

The house can be taken in its entirety for weddings and private gatherings, and the Assembly provides the largest room on the estate for a ceremony, a dinner or a conference. Smaller meetings use the library and the private dining rooms of the main house. Capacities are set by the house on application and depend on the mix of rooms taken.

Location

Heckfield lies in north Hampshire between Reading and Basingstoke, a short drive from junction 5 of the M3. Hook station, on the line from London Waterloo, is the nearest railway stop, and Heathrow is roughly 45 minutes by car. Stratfield Saye, the Duke of Wellington's house, and the Vyne, a Tudor house owned by the National Trust, are among the nearest estates. A luxury hotel in Hampshire with its own farm, dairy and woodland, Heckfield Place draws as many guests for its grounds as for the house itself.