Heckfield Place — which opened earlier this summer and sits at the heart of a sprawling 400-acre estate — has already been a hit with the style set (everyone from Liv Tyler to Derek Blasberg checked in following Princess Eugenie’s recent nuptials).
With Skye Gyngell as culinary director and impeccable interiors from Ilse Crawford protégé Ben Thompson, this is hardly surprising.
For beauty disciples, there’s the Little Bothy, the hotel’s in-house spa overlooking Heckfield’s impossibly bucolic walled gardens, and comprising three perfectly appointed treatment rooms. In Gaelic, the word bothy roughly translates as ‘shelter or retreat’. In the past, they were small huts studded around Britain, designed as refuges for itinerant labourers to rest their limbs and recharge their batteries. The difference from your Soho Farmhouses and Clivedens, however, is that the spa treatments aren’t simply spoiling: they do the hard work too.
Here the emphasis is on completely bespoke massages and facials, using naturally derived, nutrient-rich products from Heckfield’s own Wildsmith Skin beauty range (named after William Wildsmith, the former head gardener), which are decanted into a range of ceramic vessels and pots. Separately from the hotel, the Wildsmith range looks primed to offer the market a strong British alternative to L:a Bruket and Aēsop. It even boasts its own curated blog — The Wildsmith Papers — edited by beauty doyenne Kathleen Baird-Murray.
Looking for the hotel gym? Don’t bother. The fitness gurus Bodyism are the hotel’s preferred choice, offering one-on-one personal training sessions in a cottage on the grounds with a PT parachuted in from their west London flagship. Add to that mix a general manager, Olivia Richli, who previously spent 20 years with Aman, and construction already underway for an even larger 16,000ft spa and swimming pool set to open next year, and we could just be looking at the UK’s best new beauty retreat.
Dipal was a guest of Heckfield Place.
A Friends Room starts from £300, including breakfast (heckfieldplace.com)
