Some stories are a journey from A to B, and others involve leaving Hong Kong, a tootle around Robbie Williams’s Wiltshire pile, 600 sheep and nights in the pub bonding over maggots. This isn’t one of the A to B jaunts. But it does explain how an unsung Somerset town with a population of fewer than 3,000 ended up with one of the country’s most impressive hotels, all in a former cow shed, with a gastropub down the road. Welcome to Bittescombe.
A cow shed that now, it has to be said, has a spa, a padel court, its own private chef, a staff of some 30-odd, with rooms dressed in silks and gilt and Hermès rugs. The aim is to offer Londoners a slice of country house life without the usual faff. Not that this was all strictly planned, considering what’s become Bittescombe began as a house-hunt. “We’d been in Hong Kong eight years,” explains Samantha Campbell-Breeden — “we” being her and financier husband Richard — “but the kids were in England.”
