Lime Wood

A deer fence and a cattle grid separate Lime Wood from the open heath of the New Forest. The house stands on Beaulieu Road outside Lyndhurst, in Hampshire, on a site that was a royal hunting lodge in the thirteenth century, and the Regency building that replaced the lodge opened as a hotel in its present form in 2009.

History

The estate had been a hotel before, under the name Parkhill, but the rebuilding that began in 2005 left little of that period. Robin Hutson, co-founder of Hotel du Vin, led the project as chairman of Lime Wood Group, with the industrialist Jim Ratcliffe as its owner. Four years of work added new wings, outbuildings and a spa, and the hotel opened in 2009. Two years later the same group opened The Pig at Brockenhurst a few miles away, the first of a chain that now stretches across southern England, and Lime Wood has stayed the group's single hotel at the top of its range.

Architecture and design

The main house keeps its Regency front and a sequence of panelled rooms: a bar, a library, a drawing room and the Scullery, a private dining room with its own kitchen. The additions are built in brick and render to match, with the Herb House spa set apart in the garden. Interiors mix antiques with contemporary pieces; nothing is themed. Outside, the grounds run to lawns, a lake and woodland with the forest ponies grazing beyond the fence.

Rooms and suites

Bedrooms are divided between the main house, the Coach House, the Pavilions in the woods, and a handful of forest hideaways with their own terraces and outdoor tubs. Rooms in the house have high ceilings and sash windows; the Pavilions are larger and more private, with log fires and sitting rooms. Dogs are welcome in some of them.

Dining

Hartnett Holder & Co is the restaurant of Angela Hartnett and Luke Holder, who cook Italian-leaning food with produce from the forest and the Hampshire coast: pasta made in-house, game in season, fish from the Solent. The dining room is relaxed, with no tasting menu and a kitchen that works through lunch and dinner every day. Raw & Cured, in the Herb House, serves lighter food beside the spa. A smokehouse in the grounds supplies both.

Wellness

The Herb House spa occupies three floors. A hydrotherapy pool and sauna sit on the lower level, treatment rooms and a gym above, and on the roof a herb garden whose plants are used in the treatments and the kitchen. There is an outdoor hot pool, a mud house, and a programme of yoga and running in the forest.

Weddings and events

Lime Wood takes weddings on an exclusive-use basis, with the ceremony in the house or the garden and dinner in the main rooms. The Scullery serves private dinners of a smaller size, and the library and drawing rooms host meetings and retreats. The forest setting lends itself to events that use the outdoors, from company off-sites to walking weekends.

Location

Lyndhurst is the main village of the New Forest, and Lime Wood is about a mile outside it on the road to Beaulieu. Brockenhurst station, with direct trains from London Waterloo in about ninety minutes, is a fifteen-minute drive; Southampton Airport is about half an hour. The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu and the coast at Lymington are both close. For a luxury hotel in the New Forest, the house is unusually well placed for walking straight out onto the heath.