English class

By Bruce Palling

Contributor, Luxury SpaFinder Magazine

updated 9:00 p.m. ET Sept. 8, 2005

In England in the early 1970s, you could count the top country-house hotels on one hand: the Tresanton in Cornwall, Sharrow Bay in the Lake District, the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds, Gravetye Manor in West Sussex, and Chewton Glen in Hampshire.

This was still the era when the cheery bed-and-breakfast predominated, which meant lots of chintz, little prospect of decent food, and none whatsoever of good wine.

By the early '80s, though, the landscape had completely changed. The English country-house hotel was on the rise, propelled by Americans' love affair with English aristocracy. Staying at a country-house hotel was the easiest way to step into the world of Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and the National Gallery of Art's great Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition (1985-86). Cliveden, Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, Hambleton Hall, Lucknam Park, Gidleigh Park, and Hartwell House all rose to prominence during that decade. Then, in the '90s, the English country-house hotel was, abruptly, no longer the darling of affluent Americans, who stayed home after the first Gulf War and, when they ventured abroad again, found two new loves, Tuscany and Provence. Now you can count the top English country-house hotels on two hands, but one thing hasn't changed: Chewton Glen is still among them.

Very few hotels have this kind of staying power, and the reason can be summed up in four words, Martin and Brigitte Skan, the founder-owners. Martin Skan is a visionary. He saw the appeal of the country-house hotel when few others did. And he was planning the Chewton Glen spa, now one of the country's best, in the '80s, when the word spa wasn't even common currency in Britain. Spas were something you went to Germany for. To put his foresight in perspective, consider that today Chewton Glen's only rivals for the English country-house-hotel spa crown are Whatley Manor in the Cotswolds and the Grove, north of London, and both only opened in 2003.

Ninety minutes southwest of London by train, Chewton Glen is tucked away at the edge of the New Forest, so called because in 1086 William I (a.k.a. William the Conqueror) claimed it as his new forest for hunting. (Most of it still belongs to the crown.) Today the New Forest is the spiritual heart of Hampshire, one of the most affluent regions in Britain. One of the country's largest Bentley dealerships is near the hotel, and such is the level of wealth that one satirist described a velvet smoking jacket and monogrammed slippers as "Hampshire casual."

The New Forest is speckled with small villages, and the landscape around them is often gorgeously high pastoral: meadows groomed by flocks of sheep; rambling redbrick houses with dormers, eaves, and, one suspects, cozy inglenooks; winding roads walled in by banks and hedges; and, at convenient intervals, dusky pubs. The Forest also has a wilder side of open heaths and grasslands, which are grazed by ponies that are allowed to run wild and given free rein in the villages, too. During my visit I saw one standing in the graveled forecourt of a trim Georgian house as though waiting for the owner, and another walking blithely against the traffic, at a processional gait, just outside Brockenhurst, one of the larger towns.

Chewton Glen is something of an archaeological site of country-house-hotel taste, as there have been several additions over the years to the original building, a handsome early-18th-century brick house that was once owned by Colonel Ernest Lindsay Marryat. His brother, Frederick, is well known in England as the author of a classic children's book, Children of the New Forest (1847), about a group of friends who fled there during the English civil war and lived a life of adventure in a woodsman's hut. The original house, which has eight bedrooms, has that inimitable English homey feel--odd ceiling drops that make you duck your head; ensembles of wainscoting, cornices, and Chesterfield couches; mullioned windows overlooking staircases; and ground-floor sitting rooms where it always seems to be Sunday afternoon. Colefax and Fowler still quietly reign here.

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