travel
Stylist’s Susan Riley visits the blueprint for cool country house hotels – and the birthplace of Cowshed – as Babington House rings in a quarter century
1998. The year won best picture at the Oscars, Lewinsky and. It was also the year UK country house hotels got a major shake-up, with the arrival of Babington House – Soho House’s second outpost (its first, in London’s Soho, opened three years prior) which broke the mould for what discerning weekenders came to expect from an out-of-town retreat and paved the way for every Limewood, The Pig and The Newt that have wowed us since. Twenty five years later, and I’m crunching up the driveway of the Grade-II listed Georgian manor – it’s tucked away in 18 acres, 30 minutes from Bath – to see if it’s still got it. And I can confirm that it, and the exceptional blood orange trifle that I hoover at dinner, very much has. From the laid-back luxe of its log room and library, the twinkling lanterns that surround its chapel like a shimmering dot-to-dot or the quirky uniqueness of its 33 bedrooms (mine has a vaulted barn ceiling, with a staircase leading up to a bed in the eaves, which is a total surprise), there’s something magically restorative about the place.
