Every plate at this Somerset estate starts in its own garden

Between the villages of Bruton and Castle Cary, a 17th century limestone farmhouse sits at the centre of 3,000 acres of working Somerset farmland. The Newt is not, on paper, a conventional luxury hotel. There is a cyder press, a kitchen garden growing over 350 vegetable and salad varieties, and twelve distinct gardens that guests are encouraged to walk before they ever sit down to eat. The estate belongs to South African entrepreneur Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, who spent a decade restoring Hadspen House and the land around it. What arrived is one of England's most complete country house addresses, farm first and hotel second.

Hadspen House itself dates to the 17th century, restored with a lightness of touch that keeps the limestone walls, walled gardens and old dairy buildings intact rather than smoothing them into something generic. Roos, who also created the celebrated Babylonstoren estate in South Africa, has applied the same instinct here: formal parterres give way to wilder meadow planting, a deer park and a working cider orchard, so the grounds read as farm first and garden second, whichever direction visitors approach the house from.

Rooms and cottages are spread across the farmhouse and estate buildings rather than stacked into a single block, so no two stays look quite the same. The overall tone favours natural materials, garden views and country house restraint over anything showy, in keeping with an estate built around agriculture rather than spectacle. It suits a slower pace of stay, one built around walking the grounds and the working farm rather than staying indoors, with the gardens changing character through the seasons.

Food is the estate's clearest expression of itself. The Botanical Rooms, the main restaurant, is built entirely around what the estate grows or forages that day, with gardeners and kitchen working side by side. The Farmyard, set in a former dairy, serves wood fired, shareable plates from an open kitchen, while the Garden Cafe keeps to an almost entirely vegetarian menu. Little on any menu travels further than the estate's own beds and orchards.

The spa, built from exposed brick into the side of the estate, was designed to feel like an extension of the gardens rather than a separate wing. An indoor-outdoor pool, steam room, sauna and salt infusion chamber sit alongside treatment rooms drawing on the estate's own medieval herb garden, which guests are invited to walk before a treatment. It is a rare thing, a spa that asks guests to go outside first, then unwind, rather than the other way round.

The Newt suits travellers who want to be somewhere rather than merely stay somewhere, families keen on a working farm as much as a hotel, and anyone happy to trade city sightseeing for orchards, cider presses and a very long walk before lunch. It rewards a stay of a few days rather than one night, long enough to see the gardens change from morning to evening light.

A working Somerset farm that happens to have some of the best rooms in England.

Written by Marta Diaz · CEO & Editor-in-Chief

Avid tennis player, photographer and traveller. She curates every hotel in the collection and writes The Edit.