Hotel Hit Squad: Low on tech, high on fun – Woolley Grange is the perfect place for families to reconnect
This being January, I should really tell you about my virtuous resolutions. How the kids and I are cutting out iPads, animal products and pollutants. Except I am done, altogether, with beginning each year with pinching self-punishment.
My 2019 resolution is not only to do more of the smaller, less noteworthy things that make me happy, but to revel in them, squeezing every ounce of joy from the experience gluttonously.
Top of my list is spending time with the children in an unfashionably unimproving way. While 2019 looks teeth-chatteringly unpredictable, the one certainty is that the kids will carry on growing up and inching away from me.
So this year we will be splashing (rather than practising our swimming), eating (rather than me bribing them to gag on their greens) and watching unedifying television (not documentaries) in a warm pile in bed.
A Jacobean manor house, just five minutes from Bradford-on-Avon, Woolley Grange is a great place to do all these things. It is part of the Luxury Family Hotels group, which has just launched new welcome packs for children.
Downloadable from its website when you book, each pack includes facts about the hotel and the local area, as well as a list of 20 things to see or do on your visit. Simple, but inspired. Staying in a hotel with two small but insatiably hungry hangers-on is expensive. You want to get your money’s worth, and anticipation is a huge part of the joy.
My children, aged five and eight, pore over their pack like Napoleons, focusing their attack on “roasting marshmallows over the fire in the blue room”, “saying hello to the animals in the Good Life Garden”, and “finding the glockenspiel in the woods”.
It isn’t a sophisticated battle plan, but that’s the point. Woolley Grange excels at low-tech luxuries. You won’t find marble bathrooms, monsoon showers or massive plasmas in the rooms. Ours, McIntosh, has a lot of heavy, dark-wood furniture – a little scuffed but stately. There’s no minibar, no Nespresso machine, just sachets of Kenco instant and a fridge.
The children’s interconnecting room (Sam Beaven) has an iron-framed bed from which the paint is peeling gently, a Welsh wool blanket in cheerful red and a wicker picnic basket full of board games, card games and outdoor toys. More toy baskets dot the hallway outside, along with a pair of old carousel animals, poles running up to the ceiling. Sure, everything looks a little well-loved, but if you are staying with children, a hotel smarter than you is the opposite of relaxing.
On my second day at Woolley Grange, I realise that – for the first time in my hotel-reviewing career – I have yet to see anyone taking a selfie, despite the Bath stone terraces being ideal fodder for inducing green-eyed envy. In fact, I barely see anyone take out their phone.
Instead, they are with their children splashing in the pool – a balmy 82F (28C), with an entire glass wall overlooking the kitchen garden. They are outside, exploring the Little Green Fingers Club, where kids can squeeze rabbits, collect eggs and waddle after ducks. They are peering into the White Witch of Woolley’s tiny hovel, or the hidden fairy houses.
They are in the spa (heated beds, Espa treatments and Jessica manicures; if you can, get an Espa facial from Riyana) while their children delve into the dressing-up and craft supplies in the Woolley Bears Den kids’ club (which is heavenly for babies and little ones – though my son, at its upper age limit of eight, was somewhat less enthralled).
They are reading the papers beside the fire in the oak-panelled drawing room, while their children watch the daily movie in the charmingly DIY cinema room and staff sterilise their baby bottles. Or they are sipping wine and – whisper it – having an actual conversation with their partner, while the kids eat fuss-free meals (think pasta and meatballs) during the early family dining sessions in the light-filled Orangery.
The only time I see brows ruffle is later, in the more grown-up dining room when they look at the menu and realise a main course costs £20 or more, and a gin and tonic £10. The food is genuinely good, thanks to head chef Jethro Lawrence and his kitchen garden produce but… eep. For that price, we could be eating in the sort of London restaurant where people Instagram plates. Instead we’re in a rather trad hotel dining room…
But then they remember the free listen-in babysitting service of which they are taking advantage. And they relax again. Woolley Grange could convert a lot more people to my New Year resolution of relishing the small things (and people) in our lives.
A one-night stay at Woolley Green for a family of four costs from £179, including breakfast.
Read the full review: Woolley Grange
