Bailbrook house:Layout 3
25/7/13
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CITYinteriors
Cinderella makeover for hotel The historic Bailbrook House Hotel has just been given a £10m overhaul under the new ownership of Hand Picked Hotels. Georgette McCready takes a tour of the Georgian mansion and finds it beautifully transformed
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sk a Bathonian to tell you something about Bailbrook House and they’ll probably mutter something about it being a conference centre or the place that was used used to train BT engineers to climb telegraph poles. If those Bathonians were to walk into the finest suite in the new £10m refurb of Bailbrook now, there’d be the sound of jaws dropping on to the thick carpet, so dramatic is the makeover. Bailbrook was bought by the Hand Picked Hotels group of fine country hotels and one of their existing managers, Jonathan Squire was brought in to oversee its Cinderella transformation from a humble and fairly tired looking building to an elegant and sumptuous beauty. Visitors still arrive up a long tree lined drive, just a few hundred yards from the A46 Batheaston roundabout, to find themselves outside the imposing 18th century double fronted building. The grand entrance leads in turn to the big reception hall, which is now fitting for a four star hotel. The last time I visited Bailbrook was for a workshop in what I assumed to be a classroom, furnished with strip lighting and plain trestle tables. It’s hard to believe that the beautifully decorated and furnished lounge is the same room. Interior designer Angela Amesbury, who has worked with Hand Picked Hotels on previous projects, has a deft eye for choosing luxury curtains and soft furnishings and the 18th century Mansion House – as they’re callling the original building – feels more like a five star hotel than the AA four star it has recently attained. Standing as it does in a commanding position on the hillside to the east of Bath, Bailbrook has a fascinating if chequered history. When lawyer Denham Skeet commissioned architect John Eveleigh – the man who had already designed two of Bath’s celebrated crescents, Somerset Place and Camden Crescent – the pair decided it would be wise to build the Skeet family home on the outskirts of Bath as two separate buildings. One would house the family and the grand public rooms and enjoy the best views across the Avon Valley, the other, northern block, would hold the kitchens and servants’ quarters. No doubt the pair, plotting over the design at the end of the 18th century, congratulated themselves on this radical shake-up in domestic architecture, but sadly for the Skeets and their guests the two separate blocks turned out to be an impractical solution. Food had to be carried 48 THEBATHMAGAZINE
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from the kitchens, across a courtyard and through to the dining room, by which time it was cold. And, while the first floor rooms in the southern block enjoyed far-reaching views, anyone inside would have to descend a double flight of steps to reach the gardens. Mike Jenner writes about the history of Bailbrook House in his excellent book The Classical Buildings of Bath. He’s pretty scathing about John Eveleigh’s renegade approach to design and points out that once Mr Skeet had been forced to sell the house, subsequent familes failed to make it work as a domestic space. Poor old Bailbrook ended up being used as a lunatic asylum for 140 years. During the 19th century the two buildings were linked with the building of an entrance hall and one owner removed the steps down from the drawing and dining rooms and built the exisiting terrace outside. The 21st century visitor will have few clues to its past issues. The newly fitted kitchens are presided over by chef Peter Manners, most recently of the acclaimed Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds. Hotel guests can either dine informally, either in the Conservatory Bar or on the terrace, or in the Lansdown Restaurant, or they can discover the new Cloisters restaurant. This has been transformed beyond belief, from a rubble filled