A Slow Stay
The Newt is not really a hotel. It is a working Somerset estate — orchards, walled gardens, a deer park, a cyder cellar, a Roman villa — that happens to have rooms. Karen Roos and Koos Bekker bought the seventeenth-century Hadspen House in 2013 and spent six unhurried years turning it into something closer to a small private world than a place to spend the night.
It takes its name from the great crested newts found across the grounds. That tells you the order of priorities here: the land first, the building second, the guest somewhere quietly in between. Stay a night and you understand it. Stay two and you stop wanting to leave.
Roos, once an editor of Elle Decoration, brought a magazine eye and a gardener’s patience to the restoration. The Georgian house was returned to honey-coloured Somerset stone; the farmyard buildings were rebuilt as rooms without erasing the marks of their working past — cobbles, stalls, reclaimed oak. Nothing shouts. The palette is muted, the materials are real, and the gardens are treated as the most considered room of all.
Forty-three rooms only, for an estate of this scale — split between the Grade II-listed house and the farmyard buildings below it. The farmyard rooms are the more characterful: reclaimed timber, exposed stone, cobbled floors and deep baths, each one different. House rooms are grander and calmer, with garden views. Every stay includes membership of the estate, which means the gardens, the deer park and the cyder cellar are yours to wander at will.
The gardens are the reason to come. The Parabola, a curving walled garden, holds hundreds of heritage apple varieties planted by English county — a living map of the country’s orchards. Beyond it lie the colour gardens, the cascade, the woodland walks and a deer park, and on the far side of the estate the Roman villa of Villa Ventorum, reconstructed as it would have stood. It is the kind of place you walk slowly through and return to differently each season.
The Botanical Rooms, in the main house, cook almost entirely from the estate — the kitchen garden, the orchards, the farm. The pass is lined with the year’s preserves. Below, the Garden Café sits among the beds, and the Cyder Bar pours the estate’s own apple cyder, pressed in the conical-roofed press house. It is farm-to-table taken to its logical, unhurried conclusion: most of what reaches the plate was grown within sight of it.
Bruton, ten minutes away, is one of the most quietly interesting small towns in England — Hauser & Wirth’s rural gallery and its Piet Oudolf garden are on its edge, alongside good cooking and independent shops. Castle Cary, with its station on the line from Paddington, is closer still. Glastonbury and its Tor are half an hour west; the cathedral city of Wells and the Mendip Hills lie just beyond.
Indicative rates — vary by season and availability. Estate membership and breakfast typically included. Confirm directly with the hotel for current pricing.
Reserve at The Newt in Somerset
