Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons

Great Milton is a village of stone cottages seven miles east of Oxford, and at its edge, behind a wall and a gatehouse, stands a manor house of honey-coloured stone dating from the fifteenth century. A luxury hotel in Great Milton is an improbable thing, and it exists because of one cook. Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, A Belmond Hotel is the house Raymond Blanc bought in 1983 and opened in 1984 as a restaurant with rooms, the fulfilment of an ambition he describes as having a hotel and restaurant in harmony with its gardens.

History

Blanc arrived in England from Besançon in 1972 and worked as a waiter in Oxford before taking over the kitchen. His first restaurant, Les Quat'Saisons in Summertown, won two Michelin stars within three years of opening in 1977. He bought the manor at Great Milton with the backing of investors, opened it in March 1984 with ten bedrooms, and received two stars in the following Michelin guide. The stars have been retained every year since, a continuous run that no other British restaurant matches. The Raymond Blanc Cookery School opened in 1991, the first in a British hotel of this kind. Orient-Express Hotels bought the property in 2002, and it carries the Belmond name since 2014. Blanc was appointed OBE in 2008 and a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and in 2014 the hotel planted a heritage orchard of apples, pears and other fruit on land beside the garden.

Architecture and design

The house is a mix of fifteenth-century origins and later additions, with mullioned windows, a stone porch and a pond in front. Its gardens cover 27 acres and are the point of the place: the kitchen garden grows around 90 varieties of vegetable and 70 of herb, with a mushroom valley, a Japanese tea garden, the orchard and lawns down to the pond. A glasshouse supplies the kitchen with salad and micro-leaves through the winter.

Rooms and suites

There are 32 rooms and suites, no two alike, and each is designed around a theme that Blanc and his designers chose: Lavande, Opium, Jade and Provence among them. Some are in the main house, others in the converted stable block and in garden buildings with private terraces. The style is decided rather than restrained, with strong colours and antiques.

Dining

The restaurant occupies several rooms of the house and a conservatory, and the menu is French in roots and English in produce, with vegetables picked that morning. Lunch is the easiest table to secure. The cookery school runs full-day and four-day courses in a dedicated kitchen, and a gardening school opened in 2019 to teach the methods of the kitchen garden. Afternoon tea is served in the lounges and on the terrace.

Wellness

There is no spa. Guests walk the gardens, borrow bicycles for the lanes around Great Milton, and book treatments in their rooms. The hotel is a place for eating and for the garden rather than for exercise.

Weddings and events

Le Manoir hosts weddings and private dinners in its private dining rooms and in a marquee on the lawn for larger parties, with ceremonies possible in the house and the garden. Meetings are held in the private rooms, which seat small groups around a single table. The whole house, 32 rooms, can be taken for a private event.

Location

Great Milton lies just off the M40 at junction 7, seven miles from Oxford and about 50 miles from Heathrow, an hour by car. The nearest railway station is Haddenham & Thame Parkway, 15 minutes away, with trains to London Marylebone in around 40 minutes. Oxford station is 25 minutes by car. Blenheim Palace, the Chilterns and the colleges of Oxford are the usual excursions.