To the manors born
LITTLE appears to have changed at Grade I-listed, Ston Easton Park, near Bath, Somerset, since my visit of May 1999. Its then owners, the late Peter Smedley and his wife, Christine, had decided to call time on their 22-year tenure, having rescued the 22,000sq ft house from dereliction and established it as a country-house hotel of some distinction.
Since then, successive hoteliers at Ston Easton, the name of which means ‘Stony East Town’, have struggled to keep pace with a fast-changing country-hotel scene, and the largely unaltered Palladian house, set in 28 acres of Humphry Repton gardens and parkland, is now on the open market at a guide price of
