Detailed Review
The rooms are individual, with a character of their own. The interior style is elegant, with a definite sense of fun.
Relax in your suite with complimentary homemade ice cream, chocolates and champagne, take a bath while watching a DVD or sleep the morning away. The suites are designed for one purpose alone - absolute comfort and enjoyment, you may never want to leave your room.
With the very best in entertainment systems and communication links in every room, this is a classic country house with all the latest technology.
The garden at Barnsley House is enchanting, one of England's finest and most famous. Not grand or forbidding, this is a place where you can truly relax, with charming walks, sunny terraces and knot gardens, beautifully ornate formal lawns, ancient meadows and ungoverned wilderness. Read by the temple and pool garden in the late afternoon sun or enjoy a long drink on the verandah with friends. Allow yourself to be spoilt or left entirely alone.
Press Quotes
“Sleek, modern minimalism meets listed manor house in the gentle Cotswolds.” The Telegraph 07
"The restaurant is worth the trip alone." The Independent 06
"Book room six for the best garden views, reaching beyond the hotel’s herbaceous borders to the surrounding Cotswold countryside." Independent 05
Independent Reviews
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Barnsley House
By Mary LussianaYes, there are the famous gardens of Rosemary Verey here and yes, you are in the picturesque Cotswolds but the pull of Barnsley House is that you can switch off, bunker down and just relax. Champagne awaits you in your room – and home made ice-cream in the summer – candles decorate the bathrooms which have double showers and either twin bathtubs side by side for the couples who have different taste in water temperature or bath tubs for two. Plasma screens in bathrooms and bedrooms allow serious raiding from the hotel’s impressive DVD library. For a few days of unwinding or catching up on the books you can never finish and the films you never got to see this place is unbeatable.
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"The romantic, intimate manor house in the Cotswolds has contemporary rooms overlooking the enchanting English gardens."
Barnsley House
By Martin O’Brien
In the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, probably the most prized stretch of real estate outside London’s Mayfair and Belgravia, one of three things happens when a fine old country manor house comes onto the market. Either the property remains residential – ruthlessly agented (sans prix but no less grand prix) in the property pages of Country Life for Hollywood names like Sam Mendes, Kate Winslet and Elizabeth Hurley all of whom have recently moved into the area (nowadays you need something approaching a Hollywood pay-cheque to buy yourself into the Cotswolds). Or, alternatively, the same old house becomes a retirement or nursing home, appropriately equipped with Stannah-stairlifts and over-armchaired day-rooms.
Or, as in the case of Barnsley House, it becomes an hotel.
Midway between Cirencester and Bibury, “in the heart of Gloucestershire’s Golden Triangle” (estate-agent speak, not mine), Barnsley House has been around for a long time. Built in 1697 by a local landowner, the property has spent most of the last three centuries as a country rectory, a comfortable ’living’ for a line of parish incumbents that stretches back to the reign of William and Mary. In 1951, however, the house passed into non-clerical hands and became the family home of David and Rosemary Verey. As well as bringing up five children in this glorious Cotswold manor house, the redoubtable Rosemary Verey also began work on what is now considered probably the finest country garden in the land. Recently listed by English Heritage, it was frequently visited by The Prince of Wales whose consultations with – and friendship and respect for – Rosemary Verey provided much of the inspiration for his own horticultural endeavours at nearby Highgrove.
It is this small but serene country garden, lovingly crafted by Rosemary Verey over the last five decades, that defines Barnsley House. There may be other manor houses in Gloucestershire that compare in age, style and character, but no garden comes close. Which was why, when Rosemary Verey died in 2001, le tout county held its collective breath. Without her guiding hand, without her green-fingered inspiration, what would become of this extraordinary garden and the fine 17th-century house that stood in its heart?
Which was the moment Rupert Pendered and Tim Haigh stepped forward to declare an interest. Four years earlier they had bought the old pub in Barnsley, no more than a couple of hundred yards from the front gates of Barnsley House, and turned it from village local into stylish gastro-pub as welcoming to the villagers who’d been bellying up against its bar for as long as anyone could remember as it was to a newer, more cosmopolitan crowd. In short order – and rightly so – it carried off the Pimms Pub of the Year award 2000/2001, Which Pub?’s Country Pub of the Year, earned itself a Michelin Bib Gourmand and in July 2004 was voted Gloucestershire Pub of the Year by Cotswold Life.
What Pendered and Haigh now proposed was to turn this Grade II-listed manor house into a country hotel, undertaking to preserve the gardens and continue their predecessor’s fine work. Eighteen months later, after close consultation with Verey’s surviving family, the guardians of English Heritage and the ever-vigilant planning officers of the Cotswold District Council, Haigh and Pendered finally completed the permission-process for ’change of use’ from private house to hotel (one of the more important requirements the overruling of a clerical covenant that forbade the sale of alcohol on the premises). In February 2003 contracts were exchanged, builders started work and four months later a new Barnsley House opened for business.
English country house hotels traditionally provide a twee tourist hotch-potch of four-poster-bed and chintz-and-cream-tea clichés. But not Barnsley House. Working with interior decorator Rupert Charles-Jones, B&B Italia furniture specialist Bob Lloyd-Davies and lighting expert Rebecca Weir of Light IQ, the new owners have transformed this grand old manor house into a state-of-the-art, twenty-first-century luxury bolthole, its dark, shadowy and creaking interior sleekly, sensitively and sumptuously re-upholstered.
Here, spread over two floors of the main house and in the attached coach-house, are nine ludicrously comfortable, Italian-styled guestrooms each equipped with the kind of bathroom you never want to leave – roll-top baths (a pair, side by side, in my bathroom), walk-in showers with powered shower-heads wide enough to drench a sumo wrestler, the towels and towelling robes thicker, richer and more swaddling than a polar bear’s pelt. Add to this, seven-foot beds equipped with fibre-optic reading lights, top-of-the-range Bose Surround-Sound systems, Panasonic plasma screens and home cinema DVDs and ISDN links, and you have some idea of the extent of this magical makeover. Not forgetting the mini-bar, of course, with its complimentary champagne, home-made chocolates and freshly-squeezed orange juice.
At the Village Pub, still owned by Pendered and Haigh, food has always been as crucial a component as style (no Ginster Cornish pasties here, no sweating sarnies or salty pork scratchings) and it’s no different at Barnsley House. Aided and abetted by veteran Italian chef Franco Taruschio, who for forty years owned the celebrated Walnut Tree Inn near Abergavenny, head chef Graham Grafton, late of London’s Ivy, Bibendum and Greenhouse restaurants, has created a seasonal Italian menu that plunders Rosemary Verey’s potager and kitchen garden to sensational effect.
Accompanying dew-fresh salads and lightly-grilled vegetables are classic Bresaolas home-cured on the premises, truffled tangles of Tagliolini, Cappelletti in brodo, and the house’s signature Vincisgrassi – a lusciously layered pasta dish stuffed with Parma ham, porcini and truffles and baked al forno. The summer evening I dined, there was steak with courgette flowers on the menu, wood pigeon with cipollini, rack of lamb with pesto, turbot with runner beans and plump, wild seabass, all the meat locally sourced and the fish brought up each day from Cornwall. After Bresaola and vincisgrassi, I opted for the grilled sea-bass lipstick-kissed by its bed of roasted beetroot, before losing myself in a pudding menu – Spumoni amaretti, Affogato al caffe, and Torta della Nonna among the treats – that sounded as sweet and seductive as the list of specials in a Milanese cat-house.
Barnsley House’s new owners are not the first to set up a stylish hideaway in this sought-after part of the country, and they certainly won’t be the last. But theirs will surely be a hard act to follow, preserving with great style and panache the soul and spirit of a grand old estate that would otherwise have been lost for ever – yet another lino’ed zimmer-frame waiting room, or Hollywood home set behind high walls and security gates.
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