HOTEL REVIEW


pig hunting for truffles. His career has been well documented in these pages but is worth repeating. The Hotel du Vin group, which he inaugurated in 1994, grew from a single property in Winchester to a six strong group of hotels across the UK, enjoying critical and commercial success with its combination of provincial French bistro cuisine and unfussy yet stylish interiors. During this period he also helped Soho House founder Nick Jones to redefine the country house hotel experience as Non Executive Chairman of Babington House, a role which evolved into full time executive chairmanship of Soho House Group after Hotel du Vin was sold to Malmaison’s owners MWB. Having steered Soho House through a period of rapid expansion prior to


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obin Hutson seems to be able to sense the direction in which the public’s tastes are heading with the same intuition as a


its acquisition by Richard Caring, he stepped down in 2008, re-emerging as Chairman of a new hotel group Lime Wood, whose eponymous New Forest property aimed to redefine the luxury country house hotel experience. But it is his latest project, The Pig, a conversion of the former Whitley Ridge hotel located just down the road from Lime Wood, that may have the greatest impact on the UK’s rural hotel scene. Where Lime Wood has quickly established itself amongst the A-list of British five-star hotels, Hutson’s aim with The Pig is to reinvent the mass market, three-to- four-star tier of country house hotels. In other words, those swathes of mediocre, swagged- and-tailed fusty manor house hotels that dot the English landscape. Described as “the antithesis of the traditional, tweedy country house hotel,” the heart and soul of The Pig’s offer is its walled kitchen garden, overseen by kitchen gardener Mike Kleyn, whose CV


ABOVE: The main dining room is a Victorian-style greenhouse designed with mismatched chairs, a colourful mosaic of Belgian floortiles and indoor planters and seedtrays


WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2012


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