World’s best for autumn colour? Stourhead has a claim.

The English class system has done a lot of damage over the centuries, but we can also bless it for its impact on architecture and interior design. In the success-obsessed United States, new money has tended to splash out on bling-drenched conspicuous consumption. In England, while the consumption might be equally prodigious, self-made fortunes seek the best in establishment tastes and bend over backwards to rub off any taint of the new.

In just the past few months, the trend has shown up on this blog in articles about Harewood House and Bovey Castle. And here, on a crisp autumnal day en route to the West Country, the glorious Georgian mansion and landscape garden at Stourhead.

Stourhead was the country pile of the unfortunately-named Hoare banking family. They never quite washed the taint of trade off their hands. Though they kitted out a lavish bedroom for Queen Victoria she never visited, thinking the family too far beneath her. Presumably the Hoare’s had the last laugh, since they’re still in charge of the oldest private bank in the country and Victoria’s kingdom is now heavily dependant on financial services to survive. Had the queen lowered herself to a visit she would have discovered not only a house very much to her husband’s Italianate tatstes, but one of the two best examples of a classical landscape garden in the country. (The other is Stowe, bigger but, IMHO, not as dramatically beautiful.)

Wealthy tourists in the 18th century would return from the continent ... usually Italy ... laden with treasures that showed off what they'd seen, and fired with a passion to re-create some of the magic at home. Most houses of the time will feature Roman statuary in the gardens, or showy pieces of furniture inlaid with semi-precious stones (called pietra dura) from Florence, or a few paintings of Venice by Canaletto. That balanced approach wasn't enough for Henry Hoare, who was obviously obsessed to something bordering madness by all things Italian. 

The house is a stately Palladian cube, rather small as grand country houses go, packed to the gunnels with paintings of classical stories and Italian landscapes, plaster ceilings and decorations taken from Roman temples and Italian style furniture. Obelisks, classical statuary, collections of Roman seals and lofty gods and goddesses run amok. There are few masterpieces on the walls, but the theme is clear. Hoare was re-creating Italy in the England.

But the house wasn't enough. He went on to re-create the countryside itself. Ironically it was three Frenchmen of the time ... Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet ... who became most famous for painting imagined scenes of Italian antiquity. Gods, heroes and historic figures play out their adventures in deep, romantically-wooded valleys dotted with classical temples. There's almost always a lake to reflect the architecture and the action. Many English tourists decided they'd try to re-engineer their gardens to evoke this look, but nobody did it as thoroughly as Hoare.

This Lorrain painting in Stourhead’s collection is thought to be a direct inspiration for the garden

He was lucky enough to have the wooded valley beneath his house as a foundation, but no lake. So he dammed a stream and time did the work for him. Once the valley floor was appropriately flooded, the temple building began.  There's a miniature pantheon, an ancient and stolid temple of Flora and a magnificently bonkers domed and columned temple of Apollo on a hillside. 

A gracious Palladian bridge links the two, purely for visual effect since it's bridging an inlet you could walk around in three minutes. 

Each is designed to look out over at least one of the others, all set in a carefully chosen mix of trees. The lake is a mirror to add another dimension to your views. 

At one point, the path brings you into a dark cave where the sound of dripping water beckons you to a grotto where a water nymph and river god lounge in alcoves while carefully planned gaps in the wall conjure more artistic views across the lake to other temples. 

A towering obelisk adds to the classical antiquity, not near the lake but at the top of the hill with a long grassy avenue cleared through the trees to allow an impressive vista. In modern terminology the place is, as one of my friends proclaimed, top Instagram porn.

Despite the Hoare family’s obsession with the classical world, they couldn’t resist a few other passions of the time. There’s a sweet little cottage called The Hermitage with gothic windows and a thatched roof, playing on the passion for hermits and dark mysteries that came with the rise of gothic literature. A little over two miles from the lake stands King Alfred’s Tower, a 161-foot construction that looks rather strangely Germanic with its crenellations and pepper pot roof. It marks the spot where King Alfred was supposed to have mustered his troops in 878 before his success at Edington. Love of the gothic also led the family to rescue Bristol’s market cross, a glorious spire that was unloved and would have been destroyed by the town’s improvers had it not found a second life as a garden ornament. 

The cross marks the transition between the garden and what’s left of Stourhead village. A picturesque row of cottages, a parish church, a Georgian pub and an aristocratic stable block now mostly cater to tourists’ needs, with the cottages all B&B or holiday rental and space in the stables let out to shops and snack bars. The Spread Eagle Inn also offers accommodation, with its ground floor given over to picture-postcard pubbage. On the sunny afternoon we visited, the pub had extended service to tables in the stable courtyard and had a full menu from light pub classics to full three-course meals. I gave high marks to my ploughman’s but three of us all envied the fourth’s towering Waldorf salad, studded with local, seasonal apples, walnuts and cheddar.

I have been to Stourhead many times, in all seasons, but there’s no question in my mind it’s at its best in the autumn. And we couldn’t have timed our visit better. Oaks, maples, alders and chestnuts were blazing in a merry range of yellows, oranges and vivid scarlets, bearing miraculous testimony to the people who designed this planting scheme but wouldn’t live to see it mature. These trees weren’t put in haphazardly, but purposely placed so their autumnal foliage would create a living painting. It is, with blue skies in late October, quite simply one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

You’ve missed this year’s autumn show but the garden is open all year and the local National Trust managers do a fine job of programming special events for all ages. Winter illuminations run from 27 November to 3rd January. You can get tickets here.

The focus shifts to luxury hotels as the annual Girls’ Trip stays home

 I should have been reporting from Krakow.

Over the years my annual girls’ trip, now in its 19th year with the original trio of Northwestern University friends at its core, has brought this blog to some of Europe’s most intriguing vineyards, historic townscapes and magnificent dining experiences. We’ve even stretched to the beaches of Florida and the vast drama of Iceland. Not this year.

Once our flights to Poland cancelled, we decided that the combination of shifting COVID-19 regulations with the scheduling pressures of (now) four intensely busy professional women made foreign travel impractical. It was time for a staycation. Devon and Cornwall beckoned. Fortunately, though diagnosed illnesses were rising across the UK and much of the country was heightening restrictions as the trip approached, the infection rate in the West Country remained low. And with the money we’d save on that cancelled travel, we could splash out on some properly luxurious hotels.

Our destinations: two nights at the Bovey Castle Hotel in the windswept drama of Dartmoor National Park and three at British hotelier and designer Olga Polizzi’s famed Tresanton in the achingly charming Cornish fishing village of St. Mawes. The first was a triumph on every front, including an unexpectedly lavish seven-course tasting menu. The second, though a tour de force of location and exquisite interior design, fell down on enough basic service points to leave me questioning the value I got for my money. I’d happily return to Bovey Castle, but another trip to St. Mawes would see me trying other options in the village.

BOVEY CASTLE

Arts and Crafts designer Detmar Blow created the neo-Jacobean pile for the W. H. Smith family in 1907. Though it looks a thoroughly aristocratic establishment, the architecture doth protest too much. Blow’s traditional designs were countering the very new money that came from the owner’s stationery business. The property’s old-world scale quickly proved impractical and by 1930 it was already being run as a hotel, a status the castle has retained ever since through a procession of owners. 

The original country house is still very much at the heart of the experience. Guests have the run of a variety of aristocratic settings for genteel relaxation, from a dark-panelled bar that could be a Shakespearean stage set to a towering great hall with minstrels gallery and enormous oriel window taking in the moor. 

There’s a whole sitting room’s worth of overstuffed sofas beneath the grand staircase with its hunting lodge-style chandelier of stag’s antlers, a library that feels like Jeeves and Wooster just popped out, and a brighter, more delicate Georgian-inspired drawing room no doubt designed for the ladies to withdraw into after dinner. We lounged in front of at least three live fires across our two-night stay, with tweed-clad staff members regularly nipping by to add logs and see if we needed more drinks. 

Our rooms were all on the first floor of the main house with high ceilings and atmospheric leaded window frames, but the lower key decor that went for a more modern elegance. Extensions and subsidiary buildings bring the number of rooms to 60. There are also self-catering lodges in the grounds, which include beautiful gardens and an award-winning golf course. Even though the place seemed to be operating at or near full capacity, we never felt crowded by others and could always make enough space not to hear other group’s conversations. That’s always a bonus but feels particularly relevant when trying to holiday during a pandemic.

Dartmoor is one of the few places that feel like real wilderness in England. The landscape is vast, rugged and sparsely inhabited. This is Hound of the Baskervilles country. Storms crash across the moors with little to stop them and the few roads that traverse the national park are either lonely ribbons disappearing into miles of fern- and heather-covered grazing land, or narrow tracks sunk between hedgerows with limited visibility. In short: it’s not the kind of place you want to go driving around in at night. We ate both dinners in.  

There’s a modern brasserie at one end of the main building and a warren of more formal, inter-connected dining rooms forming the Great Western restaurant at the other. Limited pandemic options mean pre-booking is essential and fine dining is only available Friday and Saturday nights, limited to a seven-course tasting menu. This was no sacrifice, dear reader. We could have easily grazed across the brasserie’s menu multiple nights, and the culinary extravaganza on Friday was on par with any of the fancy nights out we’ve enjoyed over years of Girls’ Trip culinary excess. The hotel had only recently re-opened the Great Western so the staff was positively giddy with enthusiasm. By the end of the evening we were on first-name terms with our sommelier Richard, whose wine flights were well judged and inventive, and our lead server Emma. We were delighted by the local sourcing of the food and the time the team took to tell us about it. Autumnal liver and mushroom pate, a creamy artichoke veloute, and the estate’s own venison in a velvety red wine sauce are, frankly, exactly the kinds of things you should be eating in a firelit castle while the wind howls outside.

The weather isn’t always frightening on Dartmoor and there’s a wealth of things to do here, including hiking across dramatic views, villages with a high proportion of interesting gift shops and galleries and a vast number of tourist attractions from worthy National Trust houses to child-pleasers like Pixieland and the House of Marbles. We ventured out briefly but spent most of our visit simply enjoying the facilities. This includes a beautiful Art Deco-style pool with deep blue tiles, a built-in jacuzzi and a glass wall taking in more of that sweep of moorland. Access to that and the gym is included with your room, though these days must be pre-booked. The castle also has a range of country activities including shooting, archery, fishing and carriage rides that can be booked for an additional fee.

We were all sorry to leave, but the promise of an even more lavish experience lay ahead.

TRESANTON

Hotel Tresanton is one of those places that’s acquired the status of legend amongst affluent London executives. Spoken of with the same reverence people lavish on the Soho House properties, the members’ club at Skibo or the Ivy’s private dining room back when there was only one “The Ivy” in the UK, designer and hotelier Olga Polizzi’s laid-back beach club in Cornwall has been a go-to choice for the great and the good’s seaside holidays since it opened in the late ‘90s. Its exquisite interiors have probably featured in every British design magazine and it regularly turns up in the luxury escapes features of publications like the Financial Times’ “How to Spend It” or Country Life’s travel supplements. 

We were expecting a lot. 

We were disappointed.

Tresanton is nearly 40% more expensive than Bovey Castle and yet the Dartmoor hotel beat it on every front; most particularly on service and on pandemic management that made us feel safe. Tresanton has the feeling of a place resting on its laurels, so sure of the adulation of fashionable London that it doesn’t have to try very hard. That may be the case at the moment, when pandemic-constrained people are dying to get back to familiar places, foreign travel is curtailed and executive home workers are flush with the cash they haven’t spent on commuting and foreign holidays. But it’s a dangerous strategy for a travel industry in crisis. All four of us left with the same conclusion: we’d return to St. Mawes but not to Tresanton, and we’d warn people away from repeating our mistake.

Let me start with the positives. Location. Location. Location. St. Mawes is the kind of adorable fishing village that feels like it’s been cooked up to stage an Agatha Christie detective story or charming little film scripted by Richard Curtis. It snakes around a small, peaceful inlet like an inverted question mark near the entrance to the Fal estuary. A Tudor castle guards one side of the inlet, a lighthouse the other. A jumble of houses ring the harbour and run up the hills behind it, almost all of architectural merit and as pristine as a Disney park. Pastel walls are freshly painted, thatch roofs fairly new, pristine pots spill over with flowers and clean windows sparkle. Tresanton’s windows, balconies and terraces take all of this in. At the edge of the village by the castle, the hotel is far enough away from the centre of things to enjoy the quiet, but a 10 minute stroll will take you to the bustling little harbour with two excellent pubs, a wind-sheltered beach, gift shops and a regular ferry service to Falmouth. There’s loads to do in the surrounding area but you can easily sink into the local scene and abandon your vehicle in the hotel’s hidden car park until it’s time to leave.

Tresanton lives up to its design icon status. Polizzi won plaudits for mixing casual and formal, antique and modern, print with pattern. Most of the place feels like an eclectic and tasteful private home assembled over generations rather than a commercial establishment. There are sisal carpets, slouchy overstuffed down sofas and chairs, piles of intriguing holiday reading and eclectic mixes of art, from African tribal masks to local legend Barbara Hepworth's prints. The restaurants is a cheery blend of blues and whites with aquatic mosaics on the floor and sea shell shaped lighting giving the room a grotto feel. Polizzi arguably established what’s now the standard for high-end boutique hotels. Alnwick’s Cookie Jar, my favourite boutique hotel of recent years, is a direct descendant of what started here. 

The design ethos wasn't uniform, however. Though our twin-bedded room had a glorious bathroom with marble tub and glass shower cube, the girls in the singles reported "identikit Hilton bathrooms with cheesy plastic shower curtains." Loos off public spaces had high end toiletries to wash your hands but cheap paper towels to dry them. Rooms had toilet paper but no tissue. A wall unit in a downstairs hall offered Wellington boots to borrow for tramps along the beach, but some had been put away muddy so were hardly enticing. The longer we stayed, the more we noticed these little gaps in attention to detail.

Our biggest problem with the hotel came from the lack of indoor space, however, exacerbated by a cavalier attitude toward the pandemic. Tresanton is a complex of multiple buildings climbing a hill, with exquisite courtyard gardens and balconies framed by sub-tropical gardens. There was only one indoor sitting room available for 30 guest rooms. Bovey Castle has double the rooms but probably 10 times the indoor lounge space. Tresanton's sitting room (below) is clustered tightly with sofas and chairs and fully packed at meal times when the restaurant adds outside diners to residents. Though staff wear masks the guests can remove theirs as soon as they order drinks. None of us had been with this many strangers in such close proximity since the pandemic started, and we were distinctly uncomfortable. 

The dining room was also packed tight without any of the now-standard Perspex screens to offer some protection when tables are too close for comfort. The food is certainly not worth the sacrifice. Though pleasant, it was inferior to, and more expensive than, meals we had in the village.

The crowding sent a clear message: making money took priority over guest safety.

Even without a pandemic, at this lofty price point you expect more public space to lounge. There was an additional function room behind the lounge and a secondary bar at beach level that could have made extra room, but they were shut tight. Tresanton hadn't adapted any of the outdoor spaces to inclement weather use. No marquees, no canopies. We saw heaters and umbrellas but they weren't deployed. Excusable if we were in Greece but this is Cornwall, where changeable weather should be factored into any plan.

Service was average to indifferent, an impression exacerbated by just how exceptional it had been at Bovey Castle. Interaction was pleasant but perfunctory. There seemed to be no real interest in how we were enjoying our stay (until we checked out) and no desire to chat with us to discover our plans and suggest recommendations. An offer of drinks once settled in the only lounge could take up to an hour. There were no tea and coffee making facilities in the room and a delivery of the request took 40 minutes one morning. When assembled as a foursome we'd ask for water or coffee and it would come with a drinking vessel only for the requestor unless we specified for all of us. Little things, but things that a top boutique hotel hosting our group in the past would figure out after the first interaction. 

We were also intrigued that other than the front desk staff most of the service team seemed to have originated from either Eastern or Southern Europe. While we're used to that in London, it seemed odd in a distant county where employment is so heavily dependant on tourism. Boutique hotels usually put local staff front and centre to show off the nature of the place and provide those insider tips only the natives know. You'll get none of that here.

In reflection, I realise that what bothered me most about Tresanton was the feel it wasn't Cornish at all, but a seaside-themed bubble transported intact from Knightsbridge with all the capital's quirks. The not-quite-on-their-game-yet staff of young immigrants, the crowding, the aloof urban attitude. 

At a lower price point we could have let the irritations ... other than feeling unsafe ... slide in favour of enjoying the views. But let's lay it on the line here: our spacious double with a sea view was £370 per night.  In any circumstance I expect a flawless experience for that price. These days, I also want excessive care of my health and a feeling that the establishment isn't resting on its laurels, but finding ways to innovate and excel through changing times. 

 

Crowd-limited British Museum is a rare treat for advance bookers

Under normal circumstances, it's hard to get a good look at the Rosetta Stone. Sure, admission to the British Museum is free and it stands in its own display case in a prominent location. But the tourists are usually 10 deep. School children block the way with notebooks they hold before them to complete class assignments. Group tours are shepherded around it by guides. Aggressive photographers elbow you out of the way to get the right shot. It's been years since I've bothered to take a good look at this monumental bit of history. The crush just wasn't worth it.

No longer.

One of the silver linings of Covid-19's cloud is the visitor experience at cultural attractions. Though pre-booking is a hassle and the limited numbers are killing institutional finances, the situation has created an idyllic environment for the thoughtful visitor.  The British Museum is a case in point. 

The limited number of tickets per time slot ensures plenty of distance between you and other visitors, meaning galleries are sparsely populated and ... since the UK's "rule of six" eliminates the possibility of school groups ... remarkably quiet. Though I'm a British Museum member and know the place well, the circumstances revealed new wonders. I usually push through the ground floor Egyptian galleries on my way somewhere else; they're always too noisy and crowded to enjoy. This time, I could stand alone in pools of dappled sunlight, look into the faces of long-dead pharaohs and have space to contemplate. 

I lingered with the Elgin marbles appreciating the nuances of drapery over the human form. I took time in the Enlightenment Gallery to peer onto shelves and read labels. I still moves fast through the Aztec section, where bloodthirsty gods in dim lighting are even creepier when you're alone with them.

The real genius of the current situation, however, may be the enforced one-way system, which drives traffic through some galleries that most visitors usually race through in their determination to cover the star sights, or skip altogether. (Detail-oriented readers may remember I've raged against set museum routes in the past, particularly at the Uffizi, but in the current circumstances this works.) The route includes the oft-missed early Greek galleries, where a massive and rare terracotta sarcophagus deserves more fame, the never-missed Elgin marbles, and the stately Neried monument. Sitting in front of the last is a fascinating modern work by Grayson Perry called the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, which imagines a ceremonial burial ship for all of the nameless artisans who made the treasures in the collections here. The ship is clad with plaster casts that echo masterpieces from around the museum, bringing every artistic tradition together in the celebration of the act of creation itself. It's spectacular.

On the other side of the building you can explore the Americas gallery where you can see an array of Native American costumes and artefacts that many museums in the "Wild West" would envy. There are those spooky Aztecs, and the Enlightenment Galleries which were originally built for George III and represent the museum's collections in miniature. 

But the greatest triumph of the enforced route will be increased traffic through the African galleries, often missed because of their basement location. 

These rooms bring together art, furniture and textiles from across the continent, though they're light on Egypt and Islamic North Africa since those cultures are amply represented in their own galleries. The greatest masterpieces here are the Benin Bronzes, gorgeous casts of human heads, animals and ceremonial scenes created in the 1500s. The most remarkable are a set of plaques showing palace life and ritual that once decorated the palace of the king. They're also probably the most contentious of all objects in the museum as, unlike the legally purchased Elgin Marbles, these were undeniably the legacy of an aggressive campaign of looting at the end of violent conflicts in the late 19th century. 

More than 80 museums around the world ... but outside Nigeria ... now own treasures removed in those wars. An organisation called the Benin Dialogue Group, in which the British Museum plays an active role, is working with the government of Nigeria to care for the treasures, raise their profile and knowledge of the culture that produced them and discuss repatriation. However you feel about how the bronzes got here, and where they should live today, if you live in London and haven't seen them you're doing yourself a real disservice. 

I find the clothing and textiles particularly beautiful. The workmanship is exquisite and the patterns remind you of just how much traditional African patterns have influenced Western design. I'm particularly fond of a display of hats and headgear which is not only enormously fun in the way they seem to float in their glass case, but show off in a very tangible way just how diverse the cultures of the continent are. There's no shying away from the historic conflicts that have, and still do, rip those cultures apart, but there are some good news stories here. One of my favourite pieces is The Tree of Life a sculpture of a tree brimming with wildlife made completely from decommissioned arms turned in at the end of Mozambique's civil war.

There's more than history down here. Unlike most of the rest of the museum, these galleries feature modern craftsmanship that rotates through on a regular basis, so you're never sure what you're going to find. There's currently a display of some of the most spectacular masquerade costumes I've ever seen, combining venerable traditions with modern metalwork to give us something I suspect most humans born before 1700 might have mistaken as gods. 

There's also an abstract stone sculpture of a woman that's reminiscent of the African artist's booth at the annual Hampton Court Flower show. For a bit of an investment, you too could have something worthy of a museum gallery.

The big drawback of the current pre-defined route is that it takes you through just a tiny percentage of the collection. The entire first floor and the whole northern building, with the exception of an exit route, are closed off, as are side galleries on the ground floor. You won't see anything from the European collections. No palace walls from Ninevah. The Sutton Hoo treasure remains in splendid isolation, as do the recently renovated Arabic galleries and all the Chinese and Japanese collections. Most important to note, should you be contemplating a visit with the younger generation, is that the galleries of child-enchanting mummies are out of bounds.

Don't let any of that dissuade you from reserving tickets. Your visit may be limited, but the quality of the viewing experience more than makes up for the quantity of sights available. And if it encourages you to spend some time in those African galleries, you will have found a real silver lining to this pandemic's cloud.