LFH to open hotel at Ickworth House
Part of Ickworth House, the National Trust building in Suffolk, is to be run as a hotel by Luxury Hotels Management (LHM), the parent company of Luxury Family Hotels (LFH).
The company has been granted a 99-year lease and plans to spend £2.5m refurbishing what will become the Ickworth Hotel. The hotel will be in the east wing, which will contain 32bedrooms, and in the lodge, which will have 11 apartments.It is expected to open in autumn 2001.
The National Trust drew up a shortlist of four from an initial 180 who were interested in Ickworth, which is near Bury St Edmunds. Guy Hand's Handpicked Hotels is believed to have been among them.
LFH, founded by Nicholas Dickinson and Nigel Chapman, has four hotels including Woolley Grange at Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, and Fowey Hall, in Fowey, Cornwall.
LHM's other operating division, Alias hotels, has bought a site for its third hotel for £2.5m in Manchester. The 60-bedroom hotel on Piccadilly will open in early summer 2001. The first Alias hotel, Hotel Kandinsky in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, opened in March and the second, Hotel Barcelona, is due to open in December in Exeter, Devon.
See Caterer, 27 July for a feature on Hotel Kandinsky.
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper, 20-26 July 2000
