England - 3
Look at Room in a Productive Garden, also known as the gym or fitness centre at The Newt in Somerset. It shows how much care the estate’s owners, Koos Bekker and Karen Roos, put into everything.
Room in a Productive Garden is just that. It’s a room, total, about 150 square metres, with what is said to be the largest uninterrupted glass facade in Europe. Work out inside in the gym that is full of the latest Technogym equipment, and you’re looking at produce that may well appear on your dinner table a few hours later.
Room in a Productive Garden has been designed by Invisible Studio, the practice of highly acclaimed architect Piers Taylor, who has done several well-known television shows, including The House That £100,000 Built and The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes. He’s also Professor of Knowledge Exchange in Architecture at the University of the West of England.
Having used calories only a week ago at the new gym at Six Senses Zighy Bay, Girlahead is only too aware of how important it is to look out at something when you’re on a treadmill, say. The worst of all is when treadmills are side by side, which is what the designers at Four Seasons Singapore have avoided. There, all the pieces of equipment are at different angles to avoid that feeling of military precision. At The Newt it’s eight steps up from the vegetable garden to Room in a Productive Garden. If you carry on a few more steps, you come to the yoga studio, the same building as the fitness centre. Girlahead popped up there at 7:15 to be amazed that inside the yoga studio were at least 12 prone bodies taking a respite in their daily yoga. Apparently, The Newt, the hotel, attracts wellness enthusiasts – it also attracts, of course, garden lovers, food lovers, and the ultra-oultras who want simply the best. Go through the vegetable garden and you cross the walking driveway to some old buildings that have been converted into the spa. Behind that is a heated pool with a cold pool next to it. And at that early hour, there were two or three hotel guests wandering around in their white bathrobes and white slippers coming back from said waters. It’s such a contrast, the new to the old.
And old it is. The main buildings, below, were originally built between about 1687 and 1690 by barrister William Player on his Hadspen estate and obviously altered over the centuries. The current owners changed the name from Hadspen to The Newt in honour of the rare, and protected Great Crested Newts (Triturus cristatus), living in ponds on the estate.
Karen Roos, who’s done the interiors throughout, has blissfully not attempted to obscure history. Bedroom #2, up 25 hessian-covered wood stairs, is calm and cool in colour (softest sage, everywhere) and looks – and only one brand visible anywhere. A very big four-poster is thankfully denuded of drapes. A very small television sits on an antique desk in one corner. There are several antiques, including in the toilet nook, which has a marble floor. The freestanding copper-exterior hip bath does have a prominent sign, Patchpole & Rye, Kent England. It’s all practical, with a heated towel rack and brand-free screw-top toiletries rather than always-a-problem pump-pots. All this, and, if you open soft-sage wood shutters, you look over a croquet lawn to manicured gardens – with a fountain in a pond presumably home to those little fellas – and fields….
