Welcome to the third iteration of Vogue’s global spa guide, a collection of the 100 best spas in the world, compiled based on first person reviews and careful editing. This year, we’ve renewed our focus on places that have established a reputation for exceptional care of body and mind. Whatever you are seeking when it comes to wellness, there is something here for you.
Why go here?
Heckfield Place is less than a decade old—this delightful hotel and 438-acre estate in the Hampshire countryside, just an hour’s drive from London, only opened in 2018—but it already has the feel of an institution. You can chalk that up partly to the grandeur of its setting: the sweeping driveway, the Grade II-listed Georgian manor house that is its beating heart, and of course, the elegantly landscaped gardens, which include two lakes, a seemingly endless number of forest trails, and a working farm.
Any reliance on the clichés of an English country house hotel ends there, however: The interiors have been very stylishly reimagined by Ben Thompson, a protégé of Ilse Crawford, with bespoke contemporary furniture, crackling fireplaces, and a distinctive palette of soft greys, sages, and earth tones that threads its way through every room. (I especially loved the earthy feel of the hand-woven rush mat sourced from a local workshop at the foot of my bed, and the terracotta tiles in my bathroom.) It doesn’t look, or feel, quite like anywhere else, which is exactly what you hope for from a hotel of this caliber.
And then, there’s the 17,000-square-foot spa, which only opened in 2023, The Bothy by Wildsmith (Wildsmith being the hotel’s in-house skincare line, named after the estate’s head gardener in the 19th century. The brand has become so popular that it’s now sold in Liberty and often appears in the bathrooms of rival hotels—it’s just that good.) The reason it opened so many years after the hotel is that the team wanted to make sure every detail was right, and that patience paid off: it’s a doozy. In the words of The Bothy’s director, Reka Seres-Erdei: “The Bothy is the reknitting of all parts of the estate—it represents the vision of accepting and living by the natural cycles of seasons.”
Photo: Courtesy of The Bothy by Wildsmith
#Bothy #Heckfield #Place
