Breaking all the rules
No rules are good rules at Babington House. Guests at the Somerset country house hotel cum private members' club can wander down to breakfast at 4pm - in their dressing gowns if they so wish and no one will raise an eyebrow. They can drink Champagne until six in the morning in the hotel's bar with a squirming child on their knees, or roll up for dinner at 3am. Wear a jacket and tie and eyes will roll, and is that the Verve playing on the sound system?
This is owner Nick Jones's protest against the traditional country house hotel - and hotels in general. "I'm amazed at how large hotel companies haven't moved forward," says the ex-Trusthouse Forte employee.
There's much that annoys him. Silver cloches in starched dining rooms, marble bathrooms, chintz, weedy showers, "staff who look like they've just been to a funeral", breakfast by 9.30am, last orders in a hotel restaurant at 9pm, jackets and ties, only two wines under £20 on a hotel wine listÉ
Babington House opened in August last year, with much cooing from the more design-friendly press. But then Jones has some well-connected friends. He owns London media hang-out Soho House, a private members' club with 1,000 potential members stuck on a two-year waiting list. Jones also owns Café Bohäme in Old Compton Street, the Soho bar-restaurant that led the area's pavement-café revolution. Café Bohäme is expanding too. Jones recently did a deal with Forte to install a version in its Eastgate hotel in Oxford.
Soho House members automatically become members of Babington House, and vice versa, though Babington, unlike Soho House, is open to the public. Guests become temporary members when they book a room for the night. If they've just come to eat, that's another matter. The first couple of visits to either of the two restaurants at Babington House are permitted, but then guests must cough up the £550 annual membership fee (£850 for joint membership) or it's a polite goodbye.
Manager James Pullan insists that becoming a member of Babington House is nothing to do with who you know or what you do, "like most London clubs" (including Soho House). "The only criterion here is whether you are into the concept of it," he says.
Town meets country
Initial worries from the London crowd included the potential horror of rubbing shoulders with corduroy-wearing country bumpkins. Though farmers do make up some of Babington's membership, they're not the type to be fazed by the Avengers-style bar or the spiky-haired staff. But woe betide any Babington member who is using the country house hotel as a back door to Soho House. If their name appears more frequently at the latter then their membership is snatched away, says Pullan.
Members at Babington House are made up of vibe-hungry locals, mostly 30-somethings with kids, who must live within a 30-mile radius. This snares both Bath and Bristol. The in-house edit suite gives some indication of the careers of many members. "It makes sense to restrict the radius in some way, as we want our members to use Babington as a proper club - you know, read the papers, chat to other members or just chill out," says Pullan. "We aren't interested in people who just want to use it as a health club or a restaurant."
Who could blame them? The facilities are mind-boggling. The Cow Shed health club offers two pools, a 15.5m indoor pool and a steamy 18m outdoor pool, both open all year round. It has all the latest sports equipment, a sauna, a steam room and a therapy centre with two massage suites and two treatment rooms. Specialised treatments include acupuncture (£40), shiatsu (£45), Indian head massage (£25), shirodhara (dripping oil on forehead, £55) and ayurveda (Indian healing, £90). There's BodyScan (£100), craniosacral therapy (£45) and primordial sound meditation. Or you could just load up with the house "smellies", a range of its own organically manufactured therapeutic scents, skin- and hair-care products and aromatherapy oils, a selection of which are available in all the rooms.
The Cow Shed also houses the air-conditioned 45-seat cinema that shows pre-release, art-house and experimental films on the quieter nights (Monday to Thursday).
Fully booked
Brushing aside rumours of empty rooms midweek, Pullan - who takes a back-seat role from next month and hands over the day-to-day running to Bodo Klingenberg, who comes from Lucknam Park - reports that occupancy is running at an average 65% and 100% at weekends. "We're fully booked at the weekends until the end of February," he boasts. Rack rate for the 22 en suite bedrooms starts at £160 a night rising to £210, with "special packages" available midweek.
The bedrooms are straight out of Elle Decoration. The interior magazine's founding editor Ilse Crawford had a hand in the design. "We showed her things and she said yes or no," says Jones. But mostly it was down to Jones and the rest of his team. Many pieces of furniture were specially made.
The bathrooms cause the most excitement for Jones and his guests. The baths, huge and free-standing, are sunk into decking and stand alone in the centre of the room or at the foot of the bed. Shower-heads are the size of dinner plates, and the showers themselves are stainless steel-lined. There are concealed speakers linked up to the Denon sound system in the sitting area - each room is sound-proofed - and there's another TV suspended over the tub. "The bathrooms are designed to be more of a social place," says Jones.
The biggest TV is in the sitting area. It's a 32in Philips Cool Green wide-screen with surround sound (£2,500), 200 channels and set up for digital video discs, which are available from reception. Colours are muted - charcoals, dove grey and caramel - with plenty of natural fabrics. Hessian is a favourite, and there are wooden floors throughout.
Another barn is being converted into bedrooms. Jones is planning on 36 bedrooms in all, at a development cost of £120,000 per room. "It was a problem raising funds, but we got there in the end," he says. The total cost so far has been £4.5m. Jones is cagey about who the shareholders are, but they are all members and there are many, including actor Neil Morrisey.
Kids are welcome at Babington House, and while Pullan denies they run amok, the weekends are punctured by the odd charging minor and high-pitched shriek. Most members prefer to deposit their kids free of charge in the Little House, a converted barn next to the house. There's a ratio of one nanny to five children, and every toy imaginable.
Food is taken seriously. "Food and beverage is a nuisance to most hotels," says Jones, who insists he's not trying to compete with nearby Ston Easton.
Food is simple and gutsy. Average spend is £35 (including wine) in The Restaurant, a 70-seater open for dinner on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and for Sunday lunch. The Breakfast Room seats 35 and is open round the clock. There is some crossover, but The Restaurant includes braising and slow-roasting, while Breakfast Room customers are confined to dishes that can be grilled, wood-oven baked, or picked from the platters ("deli-style") scattered over the wooden counter. There's a popular £20 "family-style" set menu where everybody dives into a selection of dishes, tapas-style.
Team work
Paul Pavani is the executive chef and divides his time between Soho House and Babington with Lucy Boyd as consultant chef (her mother is the River Café's Rose Gray), and newcomer Johnny Ricketts (ex-Alastair Little) as head chef.
Together they have come up with a range of dishes that makes the best of local suppliers and the produce from the hotel's newly planted walled organic garden. "Our food is a mix of France, Italy and England, but we don't really go outside those countries," says Pavani.
Garden guru Monty Don laid out the plans for the garden, while Francis Smith of Appledore Salads rescued Pavani when the going got tough. Sauces rarely make an appearance on either menu. Pavani and his eight-strong brigade stick to the meat or fish juices.
He admits that the 24-hour kitchen can be tough sometimes, "but, to be honest, not many people want a meal at four in the morning". The night porter is trained to put the more basic dishes together in the small hours, and a shortish "all-day" menu keeps things simple the rest of the time. "I think there's a huge gap in the market for the Babington House type of operation,"says Jones. n
Babington House, Frome, Somerset. Tel: 01373 813172
