Gardens, food and architecture vie for perfection at The Newt

The Newt in Somerset is a legend on the English luxury hotel scene, but one I hadn’t experienced yet despite its embodiment of things I love: great locally sourced food, historic houses, impressive gardens, cider, and the Chelsea Flower Show. That changed this week when I joined friends for an indulgent lunch and a wander around the property. 

One of the first warm and cloudless days of the year made the journey there as lovely as the event itself. While driving 90 minutes for a lunch date may seem mad, the southwest’s A303 is one of the loveliest roads in the country, starting with the sweeping vistas of the Wiltshire downs and a drive by Stonehenge before the hills start to close in and you’re winding through the picturesque coombs of the West Country. Hilltops offer spectacular views over undulating countryside luxuriating in the spring palette of newly lush green fields, speckled white with sheep and this year’s newborn lambs, and the shocking yellow of oilseed rape just coming into bloom. Often the 303 is made miserable by slow traffic, but I was blessed with a smooth run. At xxx you peel off onto smaller roads. More bends, more climbs and plunges, but now with the occasional character cottage or venerable old barn at the roadside. It’s not a drive I’d want to do at night, or in bad weather, but in good conditions it’s glorious.

The final approach to the hotel seems calculated more for great views and building anticipation than for speed. You’ll need 10 minutes more from the time your satnav tells you that you’ve arrived before you are finally parked up. You’ll skirt the estate walls, catching enticing glimpses of the hillside gardens, and go by multiple gate houses and entrances before finally reaching the main gate and essentially doubling back on yourself to get to the house. There’s even a view from the drive carefully placed to show off the house in all its glory, across a field inhabited by rare English white cattle. Parking is out of view of the house and its guest accommodation, cleverly hidden behind high hedges and spreading along some modern barns that serve as the administrative hub of the estate. A cheerful lad in a striped jacket, dressed more like he was heading to Henley than working in Somerset, sat in a shepherd’s hut, greeting guests and directing them to the house.

While we’re not in the Cotswolds here, the golden stone, 17th century architecture and cosy sprawl of adjoining farm buildings is much the same as you’d find in any small estate in neighbouring Gloucestershire. There’s something about the architecture and feel of the exteriors that reminds me of Snowshill Manor. But there are no crowds of tourists here. Only hotel and restaurant guests enter this way, and there are few enough of those to make it quite likely you’ll be on the approach on your own.

You work your way up a stone path lined by old outbuildings now restored to a level of perfection their original builders couldn’t have imagined. An old barn has had one wall replaced by a seamless sheet of glass, showing off a gym with equipment overlooking a small formal garden ablaze with spring bulbs. A granary, still perched on its rat-defying pillars, offers detached accommodation. Places once used for brewing, baking, laundry and storage become hotel rooms and a luxury spa wrapping around an outdoor pool. At the end of this tiny agrarian complex, two pillars mark the transition to “the big house”, in truth the kind of modestly-sized place that would have been occupied by the gentry who show up in Jane Austen novels, not the aristocracy.

Interiors are traditional with enough modern twists to make it clear they’re catering to a clientele that has both money and a taste for the latest trends. Like any self-respecting luxury hotel these days there’s no obvious check in desk, just a staff member or two popping up to enquire into your business on property. On this ground floor there are several lovely sitting rooms, each with a different vibe (drawing room, library, garden room), one of the best boot rooms I’ve ever seen kitted out with Barbours and wellies for all, a magnificent floor-to-ceiling diorama of a riverbank teaming with taxidermised wildlife and a restaurant of two halves. Part is all panelling, fireplaces and tradition, while the bit next to it is an old yard now glassed over, kitted out with orange and lime trees and with a view of the open kitchen. It was in the latter that we settled for our lunch.

The Newt is one of those places that’s deadly serious about local sourcing and, like Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir or California’s French Laundry, makes a big deal of its vegetable gardens. Which means that the whole menu skews towards the vegetarian, with three of the five starters and three of the five mains being virtually meat free. Where proteins looked to the animal, they were pork or beef raised on the estate or fish landed that morning on the nearby coast. It’s probably the first time in my life I went for two vegetable-based courses not because I was watching calories, or trying to save the planet, but because they appealed the most from what was on offer. It’s hard to beat just-cut, early season English asparagus, of course, especially when paired with a fresh egg topped with just a bit of crispy bacon. (There’s the “virtually” on the meat free front.) My main was a buttermilk-fried celeriac, essentially treating the humble root vegetable like southern fried chicken. It was probably the best meat-free main I’ve ever had; you had no feeling that you were sacrificing anything. The celeriac really was just as good as chicken would have been. Then we split some ricotta and olive oil cake, puncturing a big hole in the local sourcing story with its side of plum compote from fruit brought up from the owner’s estate in South Africa.

We walked off our relatively virtuous lunch with a stroll through The Newt’s famed gardens. I now understand why they’ve put their money behind Chelsea Flower Show sponsorship, even though they’re not a proposition that markets to the masses. These are people who are serious about gardening, and want a place in Britain’s highly competitive horticultural firmament. 

A series of terraces leads down from the house, the direct eyeline taken up with sloping lawns and fountains while over to one side a series of garden rooms are stuffed with perennials and, at this time of the year, a broad range of tulips. Whatever path you follow, you end up in the vegetable garden that just supplied most of your lunch, as much of a work of art … though not quite as large … as the famous vegetable parterres at Villandry. This ruthlessly traditional garden is left by a radically modern, undulating metal pergola that my friend, a local, told me drips with squash in the late summer. Above it is the real treasure of The Newt: the national apple collection.

There are a lot of magnificent apple orchards in England, and I never thought I’d see one to beat the wonderful walled garden at Houghton Lodge, Hampshire, with its centuries-old apples. But The Newt may just beat it. Apples from every county in the country are laid out in ascending terraces, all of them artistically shaped. There are diamond, diagonal and low-fence espaliers, goblets, spirals and pyramids. It’s a tour de force of artistic mastery over nature; the closest the English get to the Japanese obsession with bonsai. It’s easy to imagine how glorious this place is when all of those artistically-placed branches are laden with fruit, but late April as the blossom started to come out was magnificent. I suspect two more weeks will see this unique orchard at its peak.

The South African owners made their money in their Babylonstoren vineyard, and they’re taking the same fruit-to-bottle approach with the apple collection here. The Newt is becoming increasingly known for its high-end ciders, and cider-making time here is quite the event. Even now, in the off season, the equipment for the harvest and making is impressive.

A spring afternoon at The Newt was a beautiful connection with all that’s best in the English countryside. But I suspect it’s even better in the autumn, when the fruits of the harvest are rolling in and making what fills the table and the glass even more glorious. Looks like I have yet another item for the bucket list.

One of the greatest stories ever told beckons all ages at the Ashmolean

I was obsessed by Greek and Roman mythology as a child. While my peers delighted in Barbie dolls, dinosaurs or Matchbox cars I could recite the 12 labours of Hercules and pretended to be a priestess of Vesta with my imaginary sisters. As you can imagine, this was not a recipe for childhood popularity, though I’m pretty sure it did lay the foundations for a career that turned out to be, ultimately, all about story telling. 

One of the greatest of those Ancient Greek stories is that of the Minotaur, the fierce half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in a maze in Crete and fed on the war booty of young Athenians until the hero Theseus navigates the Labyrinth and kills the man eater. The brilliance of the current exhibition on the topic at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is that it’s all about the story. 

An unprecedented loan from the museum at Heraklion, modern capital of Crete near the ruins of Knossos, means you’ll probably never see this many top-quality Minoan artefacts in one place without getting on a plane to Greece. One hundred of the objects on display have never left the country before. And I doubt anyone has done a better job of untangling the fact and fiction archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans twined together early in the 20th century. There are even arresting video installations that pull parts of the show into the realm of modern art. But the Ashmolean doesn’t major on any of this highbrow stuff. Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality pulls you in with the legend and keeps visitors of all ages interested with solid story telling. The art, history and learning come by osmosis.

You’re plunged into the story from the ticket desk, when designs covering the walls and a dog-legged path to the exhibition’s start make it feel like you’re in the labyrinth itself, stepping through a door and into a dark room to be confronted by the monster himself. This version is a near life-sized statue, a Roman copy of a Greek original. 

Over his shoulder runs a series of films that tell the whole set of stories surrounding the Knossos monster, with typography, graphics and pacing that will satisfy even the shortest attention span. Dig deeper, and this room emphasises the tale’s enduring grip on the imagination, from ancient vase decoration through a Picasso print and a labyrinth-inspired London Underground art installation, with plenty of detours into early Christian maze design, Renaissance painting and Baroque gardens. 

Like Troy, one of the most compelling features of Knossos was a “real or imaginary” debate. Did the cities actually exist, are had they simply been made up as settings for fantastical tales. Both showed up in ancient writings, but there was no trace of them in the modern world. After Heinrich Schliemann found and excavated Troy in the 1870s, the archaeological world fixated on Knossos, and found it soon after. Up until very recently, you would have learned that it was discovered and excavated by an Englishman named Arthur Evans. He’s still the first answer Google gives you to the “who discovered Knossos” question.

But that’s not quite right. The appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos should have the credit. The wealthy businessman and Knossos enthusiast, whose family owned part of the site suspected to hold the lost city, did the first excavation in 1878 and was confident of what he’d found. But politics got in the way. At the time, the Ottoman Turks owned Crete and treated the locals poorly. Any treasures unearthed would probably get transported to museums in Istanbul. 

But the Turks liked the English, and were happy to do a deal with Evans, who was the curator of this same Ashmolean Museum. As concerned as the locals by the possible removal of treasures, he didn’t start digging until after the Ottomans left in 1898. That, and the fact that Evans made sure a museum in nearby Heraklion was built to house the greatest of the treasures he unearthed, is probably why the Greeks don’t hate him in the way they loathe Lord Elgin for his legal (at the time) purchase and transport of the Parthenon marbles. 

But whether he meant to or not, Evans did steal something from Greece: Kalokairinos’ credit for discovering Knossos. Which is why it’s particularly appropriate that the museum he once directed is the one putting on this show, and working so hard to set history straight.

Once we clear up those details, it’s into the main gallery where a treasure trove of artefacts from the palace site unfurls. There are architectural fragments, wall paintings, pottery, furniture, jewellery and ceremonial axes. While Evans might have left most of the artefacts on Crete, he brought home what’s probably the best archive of documentation on the excavations in the world. So this exhibition is possibly even better than a trip to Heraklion when it comes to putting the artefacts in context, complete with beautifully drawn maps and cut-always from the exhibition.

Just as when I saw these treasures for the first time in Heraklion, I was stunned by a mastery of colour and design which makes these 3000+ objects almost modern. Colours and patterns might comfortably grace a set of linens today. The octopus and other sea life swirling across pottery wouldn’t look out of place in a chic kitchen store. The wall painting of olive trees is so close to William Morris’ willow pattern you have to wonder if the late Victorian designer saw and copied. 

And then there are other things that are profoundly alien. While the naked bull jumpers might just turn up in a death-defying YouTube stunt, and beg a connection to Spanish bull fighters, the bare-breasted priestesses holding wriggling, live snakes aloft in their gripped hands are undoubtably from a very different world.

There’s enough of the odd and the exceptional here to keep viewers of all ages interested. Unusually for me, I was in the company of three young people, all of whom found items to interest them here. The curators’ most obvious play for that audience, beyond the focus on storytelling itself, is to include one of the Assassin’s Creed games. Designers Ubisoft included a quest through the ruins of Knossos to slay the Minotaur in their Odyssey installment. In the exhibition, an enormous screen follows an ancient Greek heroine through the ruins to her confrontation with the monster while a display panel explains just how seriously the designers took the history and architecture, actually working with the Ashmolean to get things right.

Not only is this gallery a compelling and vivid bit of world building after seeing all the bits and pieces that would have furnished it, but it’s a real talking point for families. This was the part of the exhibition where my 13-year-old godson was most engaged, showing off his knowledge of the Minotaur and explaining details he’d taken in while playing the game. His mother had the revelation, for the first time, that gaming might be educational and not a complete waste of time. A win for everyone.

While the curators don’t pound the point home, the Ubisoft inclusion is also appropriate because this mix of history and imagination, with some artistic liberties taken to engage audiences, is exactly what Evans did 120 years ago. He rebuilt and restored the site in ways modern archeology would no longer tolerate, and made conclusions about the people and functions of the palace that were based as much on guesswork and personal preference as fact. Even the name we give to this culture … the Minoans … was made up by Evans rather than drawn from history. In my experience, one of the reasons that Knossos is so spectacular to visit is precisely because Evans’ world building gave us a colourful, tangible portal to a vividly imagined past. Whether it’s any more accurate than wandering through in Assassin’s Creed is still a matter of hot debate.

The final parts of the exhibition contain a gallery on newer discoveries in areas around the original excavation, and a video installation inspired by Evans’ fanciful restorations. The 18-minute ramble by Elizabeth Price is narrarated by imaginary, robotic curators who have been asked to clear up the hard drives of the Ashmolean and the neighbouring Pitt-Rivers museum. They draw unexpected, beautiful but often completely wrong conclusions from their mash up. Though meant, at its 2016  creation, to be a comment on what the restoration may have gotten wrong in Knossos, the automated voice prompted me to think about how AI might interpret and curate our artefacts of a world suddenly stripped of humans. It was very weird, but it’s now the thing from the exhibition I’d be most keen to see again.

I suspect I may indeed get back for a second viewing. While Labyrinth was great for a family outing, there’s a second layer of discovery I’d like to make with a longer, quieter visit. Like all great stories, multiple tellings reveal new things.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality is on at the Ashmolean until 30 July. 

Elton John is a legend at the top of his game as he says farewell

If you are really lucky, at least once in your life you’ll be in the presence of a true legend. Given how long it takes to become a legend, however, the stars will probably be past their prime by the time this happens. Not so with the 76-year-old Elton John, whose voice and piano-playing virtuosity are as dazzling on his retirement tour as they were when I first saw him live in 1982.

That epic concert beneath the St. Louis Arch doesn’t feel like it was 41 years ago. But Elton’s made a lot of music and lived a lot of life since, which combined to make this concert a very different experience. Thanks to the remarkable ephemera you can find on the internet, I can tell you than Elton played only 10 songs at that early concert. If memory serves, the short set was because much more was unendurable outdoors on a shade- and air-conditioning free stage beneath a reflective hunk of stainless steel in the brutal heat and humidity of a St. Louis summer. Four of the 10 songs were, and remain, unfamiliar.  Half a lifetime later at the 02 the setlist was up to 20 with a two-song encore, and every tune was familiar. Much of the night was a communal sign-along. 

Elton’s hits have had a way of embedding themselves in your life, so that a heavily middle-aged crowd wasn’t just saying Farewell to the Yellow Brick Road … they were travelling down their own Memory Lane. By this point the Elton John songbook is so rich, in fact, that even with more than two hours of almost constant performance there were still plenty of classics he couldn’t fit in. You could feel the love tonight, but Lion King fans weren’t going to get to hear that one.

A fabulous video montage of career highlights behind the triumphal and now-autobiographical chorus of I’m Still Standing reminded you of the missing melodies and other highlights across an immense and spectacularly diverse career. It also reinforced the kindness and humour that’s flowed through his life, from his charitable foundations and support of younger artists to his willingness to reveal difficult times in Rocket Man and his hilarious comic turn in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

As you’d expect, video and production values were an integral part of the show, bringing depth to the songs and providing a remarkable sense of intimacy despite the reality of 20,000 people squinting to see one guy at a piano. Elton also spends plenty of time talking to the audience, and there’s a real sense of coming home. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will include more than 300 gigs by the time it wraps in Stockholm this July, but here he’s playing within the M25 that also embraces his birthplace in Pinner, and a car will whisk him home to David and the kids near Windsor after the show. Elton has always been a proud Englishman and good neighbour … I never ran into him when I lived in the next village, but local stories of his generosity and good nature were abundant … and in London those qualities somehow seemed to shrink the arena to something more intimate. This was a friend, saying goodbye to the friends who’d helped him survive and ultimately thrive. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the end.

But there was a lot of fun to be had on the way to that teary farewell. Like the perfect wedding DJ, Elton’s set majored on numbers that had the audience on its feet dancing and singing along. That included some of the classics re-worked at a different tempo, including Rocket Man, and most notably the Cold Heart remix from 2021. (Who’d have thought I’d have a pop No. 1 at the age of 75, he mused.) Slower numbers like Levon and Candle in the Wind cut in to give everyone a chance to rest and sway, still singing along, before the next rise of pace got you back on your feet. 

The encore and farewell was the most perfectly pitched piece of the evening. After several minutes of requisite darkness in which the crowd roared for more, Elton returned in his third costume change of the night. An elegant dressing gown replaced the sequinned jackets, amusingly paired with the “curfew 22:15” notice on the tickets. This would not be a late night, and the now famously tea-total Elton is well beyond his years of wild excess. Instead, he sat down and gave us Your Song, changed from a standard of romantic love to a sincere thank you to his fans for their love and support. And then, as expected given title of the tour, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. At the end, he left the piano and stepped onto a platform that slowly lifted him up the stage and swallowed him into a star field that turned into the Yellow Brick Road album cover, with the older Elton who’d just left us disappearing over the horizon. It was the 21st century equivalent of one of those remarkable Baroque assumptions of the saints into heaven, and it left an emotional and exhausted audience in a similar state of reverent awe.

And that is the kind of experience legends can deliver. Thank you, Elton. May your retirement be long, healthy, and full of love.

Two decades on, Locanda Locatelli's star still shines for elegant simplicity, regional cuisine

There are just three Italian restaurants in London blessed with Michelin stars. Though each is distinctive from the other, all three present a view of the world's most popular cuisine that's far removed from the pizza and pasta joints most people associate with the word Italian. Closest to my heart has always been Locanda Locatelli, which celebrates its 20th year with a star in 2023.

It was the first place I'd ever been that elevated Italian food to fine dining. Many of the dishes were
familiar ... the major cultural influence of my childhood was Italian-American ... and I cooked some of them regularly, but chef Giorgio Locatelli worked a magic that took flavours to a different level. Yet he did it while retaining the simplicity, and the celebration of key ingredients, that's so essential to Italian food. He also maintained a rare authenticity to regional recipes. Downmarket Italian Anglicises everything, upmarket tends to bring in a lot of French influence, or goes off piste with crazy experimentation. Giorgio's kitchen serves up dishes that might come straight from a nonna in Palermo or Piedmont, just refined to their finest essence.

It's been 11 years since my last visit, and I'm delighted to say that absolutely nothing has changed. So you could just read my last review. But to give two decades of quality its due, I'll write on.

It was a special occasion, as any visit to the Michelin stratosphere and its related prices should be. An adopted nephew provided the excuse: a young foodie whose tastes in both food and wine are already quite sophisticated, we'd offered a Michelin-starred meal if he made his expected A-level grades. His success meant we got to accompany him on a culinary journey while his parents get to fund King‘s College London. A clear win for team Bencard.

We decided to go for the full four-course Italian extravaganza: antipasto, pasta, main and pudding. Clearly, I didn't read my own review before we sat down or I would have remembered "you could do the traditional four ... but the portions here are large enough to make that rather excessive." Hey ho. We were in excess territory. The menu was so tempting it would have been hard to decide what to forgo, with the antipaste looking particularly tempting. I actually thought of having two or three of those instead of the traditional courses.

Our young scholar started with scallops, the husband opted for pigeon legs accompanied by pigeon-liver pate on crostini and I went for burrata with grilled fennel and grapefruit. The last was a riposte to all of the times I've been positive I don't like grapefruit in savoury salads. It's clearly all about the balance, which Locatelli's somehow manages to get right. The scallops were a revelation for our lad, who'd never had them cooked with their corals still attached and was pleasantly surprised. My husband's delighte with the pigeon was sharpened by an exquisite bottle of schioppettino that he proclaimed a perfect match. (This little known variety from Friuli is one of my favourites and something I'll order whenever I see it on a menu. The sommelier's unfeigned joy when I chose it was one of the best parts of the meal.) Meanwhile, the lad and I had tucked into a carricante (white) from the slopes of Mt. Etna.

Thankfully, Mr. B had moved to pumpkin tortellini for the next course so switched wine colours, or we would have needed another bottle of the red. Our scholar and I both opted for the lobster with spaghetti, which was good but lacked the sweet acidity this dish has at its best, with ripe, fresh summer tomatoes. I should have gone with my other choice, gnocchi with a wild venison ragu. Not only would it have been more seasonal, but I've never really managed to make good gnocchi at home, so it's always informative to sample a professional offering.

Our guest clearly won the contest of the main courses with slices of char-grilled ribeye on cavolo nero, its simple perfection a textbook definition of great Italian food. I chose roast rabbit leg wrapped in parma ham, again defaulting to something I love but always have trouble cooking. (The difference between raw and overcooked rabbit is minuscule.) Mr. B left the rest of the schioppettino to us, moving on to a truffle-crusted fillet of brill and the rest of the bottle of carricante. Even though I loved my dish, I was looking with envy at the others. Everything managed the trick of being delicious comfort food while at the same time elegant and sophisticated.

Only a broken oven saved me from the sad inevitability of powering through a dessert when I was already stuffed. But I would have happily continued on through a pistachio shuffle and chocolate chip ice cream,  combining some of my favourite flavours in the world. Fortunately they did have some pistachio ice cream, so we could end with a bit of sweetness without approaching a Mr. Creosote moment. Locatelli's only uses the pistachios from the Sicilian village of Bronte, famed as the most flavourful in the world. One small quenelle of the ice cream here has more flavour than a gallon of the green stuff in your typical gelateria. With flavours this intense, less really is more. 

I have been to many Michelin-starred establishments since my first visit to the then newly-celebrated Locanda Locatelli. In many ways, this place is an aberration. While the food is beautifully plated, it's closer to what you could attempt at home than the gels, towers, cubes and swooshes that so often turn a dinner plate into modern art. There's no tasting menu. Nothing is re-invented or de-constructed. The front of house staff is resolutely Italian, in a city where almost every top restaurant features a United Nations of talented youth ambitious to get ahead in this high-end industry. It feels like a warm, welcoming family restaurant, not a palace of cutting edge gastronomy. Forget all the extra pomp and circumstance, Locanda Locatelli's star is for what's going on in your mouth. After 20 years, I'm happy to say they still deserve it.

Angela Hartnett's Murano and the legendary River Cafe hold London's other two Italian stars. I adore Murano and it was the other option for this lunch the moment our scholar chose Italian. Giorgio got my vote simply because we hadn't been there in so long. Angela's is more formal, more likely to infuse the core Italian cuisine with innovation, and will offer you a chef's tasting menu. It's a very different approach, but equally delicious and I'd happily contribute my discretionary income to either place. My River Cafe experience, so long ago that it pre-dates this blog, didn't encourage me to try again. Though their team deserves credit for being the first to bring high-end Italian to London, I just didn't think the food was that exceptional for what it was (I was spending a lot of time in Italy at the time so comparing accordingly). For me, the restaurant also suffered badly from its tough-to-get-to Hammersmith location and its industrial warehouse vibe, not an atmosphere I enjoy in restaurants. That's not to take away from the River Cafe's accomplishments: this is Ground Zero for Italian fine dining in London, their cookbooks have been hugely influential and the list of chefs who trained here (Jamie Oliver, Theo Randall) is extraordinary.

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.

V&A’s Donatello blockbuster brings wonder, beauty and Tuscan sun to South Kensington

Ask the proverbial "people on the street" to name a sculptor from the Italian Renaissance, and even the ones without a trace of interest in art history stand a good chance of coming up with the name Michelangelo. He and his David are so big, they've crossed into pop culture. Go back a century and a half, however, and the answer would have been different. Donatello would have dominated the consciousness back then, just as he had in the four hundred years since his death.

It's not hard to see why Michelangelo connected with the 20th century: rebel, sculptor of muscle-bound figures of power, portrayer of brutal force and raw emotion, immortalised as a restless, troubled genius in modern book and film. But if you want to really touch the spirit of the Renaissance, from its obsession with classical elegance to its love affair with beauty and humanism to the very warmth of its sun-baked piazzas, Donatello is your man. 

The Victoria and Albert Museum's new exhibition, Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance, sets out to prove that point, and does so with style. 

Curators divide their cavernous main space into three sections with arches, walls and loggias, so you find yourself in an abstract distillation of a Tuscan townscape. The first part explores the young Donatello and the workshop system that trained him. There’s work from plenty of names you probably don’t know here, all beautiful, showing the collaborative spirit of the age and the way all the artists influenced each other. We learn about, and see an excellent video on, the jewellery making that was … like many other Renaissance craftsmen… Donatello’s first trade. Many feel that starting at such a fine, intricate scale is what gave the sculptor his virtuosity when he moved to larger scale works, particularly his bronzes. 

The heart of the show is pure Donatello, with free-standing figures, portrait busts, tombs and relief sculptures contributed from museums across Europe. Florence’s Bargello has been particularly generous, but this show started with them and came through Berlin before its triumphal conclusion in London.

The exhibition closes with a look at Donatello’s outsized impact on the art world, particularly in the century after his death and in the huge Renaissance revival of the 19th century. It’s amusing to see the counterfeits in this section created to sate a voracious hunger for the artist. And there are works from as late as the 1920s that exactly copy his style.

While Donatello worked across central Italy, he was indelibly a son of Florence. Any visitor to the cradle of the Renaissance will have seen so much of his work on plinths, walls and in niches, standing amidst so many other wonders of the age, that it’s possible to take it all for granted. The real glory of this show is the way it takes works out of their sensory-flooding contexts and stands them alone, allowing you to fully appreciate just how remarkable they are.

I don’t think anyone in art has been as good at capturing the contradictions of boys on the brink of manhood. Here we’re treated to two Davids, a Saint George and a John the Baptist, all shown as teenagers at that exquisite stage just before their elegant, androgynous features are rewritten by manhood. They exude that curious mix of confidence and doubt, power and fear, one foot in reality and one in some dreamy nether world so distinctive of the age group. The details on St. George’s armour are particularly impressive, reminding us of Donatello the jeweller. So beautiful is the young man in his martial glory we can forgive the fact that the dragon looks as menacing as a golden retriever.

But Donatello isn’t a one trick pony. His women are just as beautiful as his men, shown off by a whole wall of Madonnas and their children. The mothers are ethereal, soft and warm despite the stone they’re made of. The children are plump and adorable. You want to reach out and wiggle a toe or squeeze a fat little thigh. His mastery of children is at its height, however, in a series of spiritelli. (This was a new term for me. Why these frolicking winged children aren’t cherubs or putti is a nuance I can’t explain.) It’s as if someone covered fat, gorgeous babies at peak giggle with a thin coat of bronze to preserve them forever.

He doesn’t just do feel-good art. There are wizened, life-beaten men in a series of portrait busts, a classical form Donatello helped revive. The bronze Christ on loan from the cathedral of Padua is heart-rending in its emaciated pain. An over-sized head of a classical god is as frightening as he is attractive. And yet these, too, are all wondrously beautiful. 

Your jaw is most likely to drop, however, when you look hard at Donatello’s relief sculptures. A relief is a sculpture that rises out of a flat background rather than standing on its own; think of the raised images on a coin. Donatello is credited with inventing a technique called rilievo schiacciato, a kind of squashed relief … the whole thing only a few millimetres deep … where the artist manages to show many layers of depth.

The best example of this is a panel depicting the ascension of Christ, carved from snowy Carrara marble. The exhibition is using this as its lead image in marketing but photography can’t convey its wonder. Christ, Mary and the apostles occupy three different planes. Angels and putti are on at least two more in the background. And then the landscape recedes, in wave after wave of hills, with tiny but perfect town walls barely scratched into the marble. All created from a piece of stone no thicket than your thumb. Elsewhere the receding background is layer upon layer of architecture, while in front a crowd watches St. Francis offer communion to a donkey. (One of his more delightful legends.) That one is in bronze, as is a Crucifixion where crowds, architecture, angels and distinctive Italian umbrella pines draw your eyes ever deeper into the complex scene.

This last relief hangs in the section on Donatello’s legacy, beside copies by followers that are beautiful, but can’t quite compare to the master’s combination of technical perfection and mastery of beauty. That didn’t stop them from following in his footsteps. Much of the look and spirit that defines the Renaissance emerged beneath Donatello’s chisels over more than 60 years of productive work. Everyone that came after studied him, including a young man who would have copied Donatello’s works in the Medici gardens when he started his own training some twenty years after the master’s death. His first work would be a rilievo schiacciato of madonna and child with winged putti occupying various planes of a receding background. Very Donatello. Except the figures are more muscular. More masculine, even though they’re children and a young mother. Michelangelo had arrived. But he wouldn’t have gained his current fame had he not stood on the shoulders of the earlier master.

Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance is on at the Victoria & Albert Museum until 11 June. Reviews have been universally ecstatic, so weekends are likely to sell out. 

It’s good to be king. Especially when you’re collecting Japanese art.

Given the intensity of our cultural sightseeing across the three weeks we spent in Japan in 2019, I didn’t rush to get to The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace for Japan: Courts and Culture. That was a mistake. I imagined the royal family’s stuff couldn’t be that different than what’s on display at top Japanese museums. I was wrong.

It’s not the kinds of objects that differ, but their quality. All the things you’d expect to see in any Japanese exhibition are here: Samurai arms and armour, lacquer boxes and furniture, delicate porcelains, beautiful screens, exquisite prints. Everything was either acquired by a royal for his or her personal collection, or received as a gift from either the government or … more often … the imperial family. In the period between the commercial opening of Japan in 1853 and the beginning of WWII, both countries were empires with an exalted opinion of themselves and each fancied the other their match on the other side of the world. The gift giving was prodigious.

Of course, as any fan of Japanese culture knows, it’s more about elegance and craftsmanship than bling. So what you get here in four tasteful galleries is a subset of art and craft that exemplifies tasteful perfection. It’s all breathtakingly beautiful, one of a kind and manages to pull off that Japanese trick of being both simple and complex.

Britain’s fascination with Japan is an old one. The most striking piece in the first gallery is a set of armour sent as a diplomatic gift by the newly-established Tokugawa shogunate to King James I and VI. It’s hard, in our diverse and variety laden world, to imagine just how alien that beautiful but menacing costume must have been in Renaissance England. Given the age’s love of the exotic, and James’ love of both showing off and of beautiful things, I suspect he adored it. More intriguing, if you can tear your brain away from the sinuously writhing dragons, the spectacular flared helmet and the silk needlework that makes the arm covers look a bit like feathered wings, is the contemplation of what this could have meant. It invited trade. Had the country not changed its mind 20 years later, how might British trade and expansion have changed?

The Tokugawa armour was a false start in international relations, however, and from the 1630s to 1868 the British royals were just like everyone else. They had to buy from Dutch traders, the only Europeans the Japanese let in during their time of isolation. (The Dutch, thought the Japanese, so obviously put money above religion or making social judgments that they didn’t bring the risk of cultural contamination other Europeans threatened.) Seeing the spectacular pieces of porcelain Queen Mary I brought into the collection, you have to wonder if the fact she was Queen of the Netherlands before taking the British throne put her at the head of the shopping queue. 

The most profligate collector, however, is the same spendthrift who usually takes that title in these galleries: good old George IV. Unfortunately, George was splashing the cash when Europeans just couldn’t stop themselves from blinging their oriental collectibles up with French ormolu mounts. They were thought to make the items even more precious. While it’s interesting to see how European craftsmen played off the Japanese foundations, and what they created was masterful, they almost always take away from the allure of the original. 

While purchased collections brought in some wonders, it’s the re-opening of Japan … and the Imperial gift giving that goes with it … that move to jaw dropping territory. 

There’s more armour here, three sets each wonderfully different from the other in their intricate decorative schemes. A set of spears is black lacquer inlaid with chips of mother of pearl; the effect in a procession on a sunny day must have been incredible. Lacquer display cabinets are mind-boggling in the complexity of their creation, but pale to insignificance before a glass bowl created using a cloisonné technique to separate the powdered glass into panels, but then using chemicals to dissolve the wires so you’re left with a translucent, patterned object that seems impossible in its creation. 

There are ceremonial swords aplenty, as beautiful for the patterns and fire in their steel blades as for the ornate hilts, scabbards and presentation boxes. Throughout these objects, however, what is ornate is also generally small and subtle. I regretted deeply not having reading glasses to help me study the fine points. 

Like all the best gifts, many things here combined utility with an outrageous luxury you’d probably not lavish on yourself. The delicate mother of pearl, bamboo and gold fans. The subtly-patterned writing set and lap desk with a variety of bits and pieces that entice you to take up Japanese calligraphy just to learn how to use them. Most intriguing, an “incense game”, packaged in yet another purpose-built lacquer box with customised trays and compartments to hold all the kit. A master of ceremonies lit different bits of incense and challenged players to identify the smell, much as you can do today with sets that help to identify different essences in wine. A variety of small implements for preparing the incense made it clear some expertise was needed to run the game. I was a bit sad to see that the set appears never to have been used, all of the blocks of incense still carefully wrapped in their tidy packaging. 

The curators save the best for last. Just before the exit you’re confronted with two extraordinary screens. Choosing between them, should someone offer you one, would be painful as both are beguilingly beautiful … but in completely different ways. 

The first, a gift for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, is an almost monochrome study in browns.  It’s a scene of mountains, rocks and water, both wild and soothing. There are hints of brownish green in the mountains, and brownish red in the autumnal trees, but the whole scene manages to stay within one colour palette yet be completely realistic. From a distance it’s an almost impressionistic landscape. Up close, you realise tiny houses, crags and trees are all worked in such detail that a few square inches could be cut out and displayed as a precious miniature. It’s so real you feel yourself falling into the landscape, like the children in The Dawn Treader heading back to Narnia through the painting in the guest room. 

The other screen, a coronation gift to Edward VII, uses all the colour not deployed in the mountain scene. Here are birds, trees and flowers in riotous profusion, with one screen for each of the four seasons. Peacocks preen, cranes strut, exotic ducks and pheasants show off plumage unknown in the West, surrounded by billows of peonies, cherry blossom, quince and more. It’s as if the residents of Birdland were let loose at the Chelsea Flower Show. 

Both screens are masterworks of embroidery, so detailed that at a distance you think they’re painted. Up close, you can admire how the use of different threads, materials and techniques creates different visual effects. Usually, by the time you get to the end of an exhibition you’re a bit jaded by the wonders and might walk quickly past the last items. Here, they are worth the price of admission for the whole show.

One of the beauties of The Queen’s Gallery is that you can get your admission ticket validated for use for return visits for the next year, which means you can usually take in two exhibitions on one ticket, with all the return visits you wish. I’m already wondering if I might be able to get back before the show closes. I don’t usually invest in exhibition catalogues but couldn’t resist this one. (It was on sale!) Browsing through reveals a good many items that didn’t even register in my brain, so overwhelmed was I by all the beauty.  

If you want to drink in these wonders of Japan, make it quick, the show closes on 26 February, after which the items will return to their usual places throughout the Royal palaces. 

For more stories on Japan, please see the index “The Joys of Japan” in the right column of this blog. It lists all of my coverage from our trip in 2019, with links. Note the 3-column layout doesn’t come up if you’re viewing on a mobile device.