The Newt in Somerset

An apple maze, a walled Parabola garden planted with hundreds of apple varieties and a cyder press stand between the car park and the hotel at The Newt in Somerset, and the gardens, not the bedrooms, are what most visitors come for. The estate surrounds Hadspen House, a Georgian house of honey-coloured stone near Bruton, and since 2019 it has been both a day-ticket garden and a hotel.

History

Hadspen House dates from the late seventeenth century and belonged to the Hobhouse family from the eighteenth; Penelope Hobhouse made its walled garden well known in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Hobhouses sold in 2013. The buyers were Koos Bekker, the South African media executive who built Naspers, and his wife Karen Roos, a former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, who had created the Babylonstoren farm estate near Cape Town. Six years of work followed. The gardens and hotel opened in 2019, the Farmyard, a second hotel in converted barns on the estate, in 2021, and a reconstruction of a Roman villa on the site of a real one in 2022. The Newt has sponsored the RHS Chelsea Flower Show since 2022.

Architecture and design

The house was restored and extended in the same limestone, and its interiors were designed by Roos with a mix of Georgian proportion and contemporary furniture, in the style she had set at Babylonstoren. The gardens were laid out by the French landscape architect Patrice Taravella, who had also designed Babylonstoren's gardens, with the Parabola, an egg-shaped walled garden on the slope, as the centrepiece. The Story of Gardening, a museum half-buried in the hillside, and the Beezantium, a bee house, were designed as new buildings in the landscape; the Cyder Bar, the Garden Café and the farm shop occupy the old farm buildings. A treetop walkway runs through the woods to the museum.

Rooms and suites

Hadspen House has 23 rooms, between the main house, the stable yard and the Granary; the Farmyard adds 17 more a mile away. Rooms in the house have high ceilings and garden views; those in the outbuildings are plainer, with stone walls and timber. Guests have the gardens to themselves before and after day-ticket hours, which is the main reason for staying rather than visiting.

Dining

The Botanical Rooms, in the house, is the main restaurant and serves produce from the kitchen gardens and the estate farm. The Garden Café is open to day visitors, and the Farmyard Kitchen serves its own hotel. The Cyder Bar pours the estate's cyder, made from the Parabola's apples in the press on site, and the Creamery sells the estate's cheese and ice cream. The Newt's cyder is sold beyond the estate.

Wellness

The spa, in a building beside the house, has an indoor pool, a hydrotherapy pool, sauna, steam room and treatment rooms. A tennis court, cycling across the estate and walks through the deer park give exercise outdoors.

Weddings and events

The Newt takes weddings on a limited basis, with ceremonies in the house or gardens and dinner in the Botanical Rooms or a private room; the Farmyard can be taken for exclusive use. Meetings and private dinners use the house's dining rooms, and the estate's size allows a company to book the Farmyard in full for a retreat.

Location

Bruton is a small town on the Somerset-Dorset border with a railway station on the Weymouth line; Castle Cary, on the main line from London Paddington, is ten minutes away with trains in about an hour and 40 minutes. Bristol Airport is an hour by road. The town has become a hub of galleries and restaurants, with Hauser & Wirth's gallery and farm at Durslade. As a luxury hotel in Somerset built around a garden, it has drawn a public that rarely visits country-house hotels.