The Newt in Somerset

The Newt occupies Hadspen House, a Somerset estate dating to 1687, and reopened in 2019 after one of the most ambitious country-house restorations of recent decades. The result reads less like a hotel than a self-contained landscape project that happens to have forty bedrooms in it — split between the honey-coloured limestone house and a cluster of converted farmyard buildings.

The gardens are the point. There is a vast parabola of heritage apple varieties, a walled kitchen garden, woodland, a deer park and a cyder cellar pressing fruit grown on site. The estate has also built a full-scale reconstructed Roman villa and the Beezantium, a working study of honeybees — additions that would be absurd anywhere less committed.

The spa runs an indoor-outdoor pool, steam room, sauna and treatment rooms with a medieval herb garden feeding the products. Three restaurants work almost entirely from the estate's own produce, dairy and gardens, and guests get unlimited access to the grounds and the farm shop.