The Journal
The English Countryside Weekend
The English weekend in the country is a specific and well-defined ritual: arrive Friday evening, walk on Saturday whatever the weather, eat too much, sit by a fire, and drive back Sunday after lunch. It requires a particular kind of building — old, stone, slightly too large, with grounds — and England has an unusual surplus of these, because for four centuries the landed classes built manor houses faster than their descendants could afford to keep them. The good news for everyone else is that a great many are now hotels.
Estelle Manor
A Grade II-listed manor in 3,000 acres of Oxfordshire parkland, with 108 rooms of vintage furniture and floral detail looking out over the lawn. The scale here is genuinely stately — the Roman-inspired bath house is the centrepiece — and it is the most complete version of this weekend: you need not leave the estate for anything, including a serious dinner or a long walk.
Estelle ManorUnited KingdomSee the hotel →Thyme
Seventeenth-century stone cottages across 150 Cotswold acres at Southrop, softened into thirty-one botanical rooms, with an outdoor pool and cocktails made from homemade cordials. Thyme is really a village that takes guests — cottages, a pub, a cookery school, a garden that supplies the kitchen — and it is the best expression on this list of the Cotswolds' particular honey-coloured stone.
ThymeSouthrop, United KingdomSee the hotel →Cowley Manor Experimental
A seventeenth-century Italianate mansion on fifty-five acres near Cheltenham, where Dorothée Meilichzon's Alice in Wonderland-inspired rooms meet a slate-lined indoor pool. The Experimental Group brought Parisian cocktail-bar sensibility to an English country house, and the collision works: the building is grand, the interiors are not remotely reverent, and the bar is better than it needs to be.
Cowley Manor ExperimentalCheltenham, United KingdomSee the hotel →Artist Residence Oxfordshire
Eleven individually designed rooms in a 16th-century Cotswolds inn — rustic-bohemian, hung with bespoke artwork, with bikes to borrow and The Mason Arms serving all day. Smaller and cheaper than the manors, and arguably truer to the point of the exercise, which is a pub with rooms above it.
Artist Residence OxfordshireOxfordshire, United KingdomSee the hotel →Louma Farm and Retreat
Restored farmhouses and stables in the Dorset hills near the Jurassic Coast, with seventeen earthy rooms, a wellness barn, and a kitchen cooking from the surrounding land. Dorset is the quieter alternative to the Cotswolds — fewer visitors, better coastline — and the fossil-strewn beaches at Charmouth are twenty minutes away.
Louma Farm and RetreatDorset, United KingdomSee the hotel →Book Sunday lunch when you book the room; the good ones fill first. Bring boots you do not mind ruining, because the footpaths will be muddy from October through May and the walk is not optional. And note that most of these are ninety minutes to two hours from London — close enough for two nights, far enough that the drive back is the only unpleasant part.