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If the eagle eye of the owner is important, it’s a lesson well learnt by Nick Jones, who opened Babington House in Somerset in 1998 as a country offshoot of his London club, Soho House. It is the first, and arguably the best, of the new breed of hotels that takes the established concept of a country house party, but adds menus, gizmos, design and attitude to attract a different crowd. The hotel consultant Nigel Massey said: “Hambleton has today’s standards of innkeeping, but it retains the traditional service — they are not that worried if there’s no plug for your computer. If you want that sort of thing, you go to Babington or Whatley, where you’re not really in the country. You’ ve made a token gesture to go there, but you’re not that keen on the real countryside.”

Jones has pitched Babington directly at the guest who fancies “countryside-lite”. The metropolitan crowd (90 per cent of guests come from London) are delighted that they can have a full cooked breakfast in the bar at 4pm. They love the relaxed dress code, the purple pool table, the oversized lamps and Seventies bubble chairs. Children are welcome, and coltish teenagers named Georgia and Jasper skulk happily in the bar. The outdoor heated pool and wooden cabanas for spa treatments by the lake are perfectly done; the bedrooms filled with the plasma screen TV and generous tubs of lotions that grown-up boys and girls want.

If only some of its successors had been so clever. But I found Cowley Manor, opened in 2002 and also pitched at a media crowd (hence all those Minis), was a disappointment. I didn’t mind that its classical exterior had been mismatched with a kitsch Sixties interior. I did mind that the breakfast service was unforgivably slow; that the sales manager, who knew my job, rang me in my room as I relaxed to pick my brains about her travel plans; that dead wasps and flies on the main staircase were still there 24 hours later, suggesting no one was keeping an eye on the details.

But I cheered up no end when I reached The Grove. Pure Footballers’ Wives territory, it’s big and brash and doesn’t care who knows it. My companion rated the 18-hole golf course highly, and I loved the huge pool and spa. The food was so-so, but service was attentive and enthusiastic.

Like the new Four Seasons, The Grove consists of a rather ho-hum 18th-century manor house to which a modern building of unparallelled hideousness has been added. Both are big properties, aiming for the conference market as much as for weekenders, attracting guests who like the hotels’ proximity to Heathrow but don’t want the hassle of getting into London.

But like many a chain hotel, the Four Seasons desperately lacks the careful eye of the owner-proprietor. Instead of breakfasts cooked to order, as I think they should be in a five-star hotel, there was a hot buffet of slowly congealing dishes. The spa’s long, confusing, white corridors resemble a sanatorium, and I found it poorly designed with nowhere to put your things outside the sauna, for example.

The pool was a bath-like 34C (93F), far too hot for swimming, because it’s linked to the outdoor hot tub (although I am told the temperatures are now better regulated).

But the ultimate crime? I ordered room service tea (£9.60 for two) and was brought a pot of hot water and separate teabags. So there you have it: the English country house hotel where they cannot make tea. If I needed proof that some of these new hotels are simply taking our money and running, here it was.

NEED TO KNOW

Further reading

The Good Hotel Guide 2006 (£16.99, www.goodhotelguide.com), edited by the knowledgeable Adam Raphael and Desmond Balmer, has reviews of hundreds of hotels across Great Britain and Ireland, including country house hotels. Contributions from many regular guests are included.

The lavishly illustrated Mr and Mrs Smith UK/Ireland (£19.95) reviews 41 smart properties, including country house hotels, and runs a membership scheme that offers a host of special deals (www.mrandmrssmith.com).

NEW LORD OF THE MANOR
by Annabelle Thorpe

MY FIRST experience of a Von Essen hotel was particularly memorable, though possibly not for the right reasons. Forty minutes in a windswept station car park was hardly the most auspicious start to a stay at Cliveden, but when the young man who took me to my room told me they had “lost” the first chauffeur they had sent, it became apparent that all was not well at one of the UK’s most upmarket country house hotels.

This was in 2004, a spectacularly bad year for Von Essen, in which seven of its properties were dropped from the Good Hotel Guide, there were county court judgments against two of them, and a flurry of negative press. Undeterred, the reclusive chairman Andrew Davis continued to expand, recently buying a quartet of family-friendly hotels, Moonfleet Manor, the Ickworth Hotel, Fowey Hall and Woolley Grange.

Von Essen now consists of 20 hotels, including famous names such as Sharrow Bay in the Lake District, the Royal Crescent in Bath, and Lower Slaughter Manor in the Cotswolds. But Davis’s expansion strategy hasn’t won him fans. “These hotels fare best if they’re individually run,” says Caroline Raphael, co-publisher of The Good Hotel Guide. “When Sharrow Bay opened it was run by Brian Sack and Francis Coulson, and they were there every day. Since Von Essen took over, there have been several managers, and that doesn’t guarantee personal attention.”

Sharrow Bay was one of the properties dropped from the guide, and although it is now back in, the review is hardly a rave. “The problem is we rely on information from our readers and we have had no reports from Cliveden or the Royal Crescent,” Raphael says. “We sent an inspector to Sharrow, which is why it is back in.”

Although most Von Essen properties are classified by the AA as three-star, the company is clearly focused on the top end of the market. A new multimillion-pound spa complex has opened at New Park Manor in Brockenhurst, Hampshire. Davis is also keen to make an acquisition in London.

Davis clearly has friends in high places: Michael Jackson and his entourage took over Buckland Manor ten days ago, after several stays at Cliveden. Now I doubt that he was left standing in the car park.

See www.vonessenhotels.co.uk.

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