You can do better than Pennyhill Park's spa, but the complete on-site experience is hard to beat

Readers who've been with me from the start will remember that this blog began in a world of corporate hospitality and expense account lunches. Much of that disappeared within a year of my first post, thanks to the 2008 crash, pushing most of my reporting into self-funded territory if I wanted to keep writing. But I do still work in marketing, and there are occasionally projects that yield fringe benefits worthy of a blog post.  

This week that meant two days at Pennyhill Park with an overnight stay in a baronial room and 90 precious minutes in its well-known spa. 

Any search of the Top 5 day spas in the South of England is likely to feature Pennyhill, long established as  an indulgent retreat from the capital. Lying just off the M3 a few miles west of the M25, it has easy access from London and sits in a particularly affluent bit of the commuter belt. Sharing the property with the training base for the England rugby team doesn't hurt, either. 

My early-morning visit ticked all of the boxes you'd want from a luxury retreat. The building itself is
exquisite and stands separate from the hotel. You enter through an impressive, if pointless, octagonal foyer with central table and towering flower arrangement, then head down a long hallway with windows on either side offering views of the outdoor pools and the sylvan location. Though the whole site is built on a gently-sloping hillside, the architects have cleverly arranged the buildings to make everything seem more dramatic, as if the spa is in the bottom of a steep valley, with sides formed by the dramatic bulk of the main hotel and its hotch-potch of outer buildings. 

It's all designed in a "ye olde worlde" style, with crenellations, leaded windows, uneven roof lines, massive wooden doors, clock towers and outbuildings all trying to give the sense of a traditional English village built around its manor house. It's obvious most of it is new and the original manor house around which it's all built isn't even 200 years old. You run the risk of slipping into amusement park-style tackiness when you take this approach, but Pennyhill manages to avoid this with tasteful interiors that mix traditional and modern with particularly exquisite wallpapers and floral arrangements throughout.

At the heart of the spa is a large indoor pool with a glass wall along one side looking over the outdoor spa facilities and the main hotel. Its pool deck includes lots of loungers and a large, elevated hot tub. Across an entry foyer with a champagne bar (not functioning, of course, during my 7am visit) is a thermal suite with sauna, steam rooms, a cold bucket shower and an alcove with about a dozen heated tile loungers for cozy napping. From here you accessed my favourite bit of the spa, at least for a visit in early March: a heated pool with a variety of massage jets you entered indoors, but then swam through a panel into the outdoors. I've enjoyed pools like this in Missouri and Germany, and love the way it gives you a pain-free way to swim in the open air in the depth of winter. (Though I couldn't help thinking about the wastefulness of heating an outdoor pool all winter in the current energy crisis.)

Also outdoors is a large rectangular pool for regular swimming (also heated, but only to 21c/70f where the jet pool was at 28c/82f), scores of loungers and tables for eating and drinking. There's also something they called the Canadian Hot Tub, a multi-levelled set of steaming pools tiled entirely in black. I didn't try anything that required dashing through the bracing winter air. Heartier souls were doing morning laps in the outdoor pool.

Pennyhill's greatest differentiation point, in my spa experience, is its opulent changing rooms, complete with sculptures, sofas, state-of-the-art Dyson hair dryers and the most comfortable bar stools I've ever encountered for settling in to do your hair and makeup. The showers aren't cubicles but individual tiled rooms, with space to retreat from the water to lather up with high-end spa products before stepping into a torrent of rain from above and multiple jets hitting you from the side. This isn't just a locker room to wash and change in, but part of the overall lounging space.

As ever when I'm enjoying a treat funded by someone else, I ask myself whether I'd spend my own money on this? For the spa, bluntly: No. While Pennyhill is sumptuously beautiful, on a one-to-one comparison its facilities are pretty much the same as those at my regular Nirvana Spa, with the exception of the changing rooms. The tile loungers are even the exact same make. Nirvana's outdoor space is smaller, but it has more indoor pools and its pool with the massage jets is about three times the size, with far more different kinds of jets getting to more of your body. The difference that I suspect would bother me the most is that Nirvana's tile loungers are in a quiet room sealed off from the rest of the spa where only the sound of a fountain and the occasional snore of someone napping intrude, where at Pennyhill their position just off a nexus point between several thermal facilities must mean it's a fairly noisy area. 

A spa day at Nirvana with access to the basic facilities and a meal (no treatments) will cost you around £100, at Pennyhill it's £255 and weekdays only. Weekends are reserved for hotel guests.

What do you get for your extra £155? My guess is exclusivity. Nirvana has grown over the years to become an enormous complex hosting many hundreds of people at once. Though it's tough to tell when you're enjoying the facilities before general opening hours, I suspect Pennyhill's total number of spa-goers at any one time is far, far lower. You're likely to have more space between you and other guests there, and I suspect the whole scene will be quieter and the guests skew older. At these prices, you're unlikely to encounter the gaggles of chatty hen parties that are Nirvana's most irritating feature. (Fortunately, there are so many different spaces at Nirvana you can usually escape.) If you're looking for value for money and variety of spa facilities, Nirvana wins decisively. If you want to impress the hell out of someone, or you're looking for a memorable romantic retreat, Pennyhill leads.

Pennyhill's bigger differentiator, of course, is its hotel. Though Nirvana breaks ground on its own 70-bed retreat this spring, it's unlikely to approach the Pennyhill experience.

Pennyhill sits in glorious isolation within 124 acres of parkland. Its distinctive buildings spread out from the original new-gothic mansion and it incorporates some spectacular spaces one suspects were designed with wedding photos in mind. This includes a covered walkway from car park to main entry turned into a fairy tale bower with branches and hanging silk flowers. There are two magnificent staircase halls, a glasshouse spilling out onto lawns and a range of beautiful conference/event rooms that mix traditional design and massive windows bringing the surrounding countryside in with modern considerations like ample charging points, good acoustics, room for AV production and speedy WiFi.

The 124 rooms (one per acre?) are all individually designed and range from more traditional spaces to split-story spreads and accommodations that sit in their own outbuildings. Comparing rooms was a lively topic of conversation at the conference. I was on a hall dedicated to rugby heritage, where each room bore the name of a country's original national stadium (pre-sponsorship and naming rights). I was in Lansdowne, where a stained glass panel of the Irish Rugby Football Union's crest separated the entry hall from an enormous bathroom with a tub on a showy tiled platform, separate from a multi-jet shower room.  The sleeping area (below) was about twice the size of the average British home's sitting room, with wood panelling, traditional furniture and an enormous window overlooking the gardens. Others reported rooms with four-poster beds, balconies, funky internal ceiling lines or separate offices. One had a staircase leading to a room with a pool table.

Food and drink was, as you'd expect at this level, top quality. I'm being very serious about Weight Watchers right now, so my eyes and nose had to do more work than my taste buds, but I can attest to one of the most beautiful breakfast spreads I've ever seen. The pastries alone put Pennyhill in a separate category, of a size, variety and (apparent) flakiness that made it clear they were either prepared in house or came from a boutique bakery. The snack tables throughout the conference groaned with more tempting bakery products. Fortunately for me, they also consistently featured bowls of fruit with such perfect colour, shape and shine I had to test the first time to make sure they weren't wax.

The lunch buffet was as various as breakfast, with a broad range of innovative salads to balance the spread of hot food.

Our formal four-course dinner on the Thursday night was unapologetically fine dining, logical considering Pennyhill's lead restaurant, Latymer, holds a Michelin star. Had I been spending my own money, portion size might have been an issue. Even in the world of plates-as-art, the starter of two bites of roasted beetroot with a 50-pence-coin sized swirl of aerated goats cheese, some artfully placed micro herbs and dots of gel seemed comically minuscule. But I had the satisfaction that four courses at that size weren't going to do my diet much harm. The same couldn't be said for the champagne the staff were happy to keep pouring when our side of the table decided to stay on that rather than move to either of the excellent red or white choices. I can only resist so much temptation, and the indulgence of the night before gave me the motivation to get to that pool by 6:45 the next morning. 

Bottom line: If you're planning a top-end executive conference or event, Pennyhill Park is an ideal location. If you want a memorable, blow-the-budget weekend of food and spa indulgence, this is the kind of place that will wow your partner and stay in memory for years to come. If, however, you're looking for a fabulous day spa to soak away your stress, save yourself some money and book into Nirvana.