Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa

Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa

The gravel drive here still slows visitors down, much as it did for William Bennett and Mary Beaton when they found this neglected Ontario estate in the late 1980s and spent years turning it into the sixty-room country house hotel it is today, five kilometres outside Cambridge. The original house was built as a summer retreat for the Langdon Wilks family, a counterpoint to their homes in New York, London and the Loire Valley, and that same appetite for escape still shapes the place. What separates it from other country properties is the garden, laid out in 1902 by John Charles Olmsted, son of the man who designed Central Park, and later revived to grow herbs and vegetables for the kitchen the way it once fed the Wilks household. Twelve kilometres of trails thread through the surrounding Carolinian forest, and the spa, ranked among the top 25 in Canada by the Spa Industry Association, works with Valmont products. The recently renovated Cloister Signature rooms pair a king bed with a wood-burning fireplace and a separate powder room; other room types, from queen suites to king rooms, round out the rest. Dinner runs through the Main Dining Room under Chef Jason Bangerter, one of two restaurants on site. This is not a hotel for anyone who wants to walk out the door into a city; check-in doesn't open until four in the afternoon. It works for someone who wants the forest and the garden's history to be the actual reason for the trip. Pets are welcome for fifty Canadian dollars a stay, and the outdoor pool, open only in summer, is the least of what draws people here. Langdon Hall pairs a Carolinian forest and a 1902 garden designed by John Charles Olmsted, son of the Central Park designer, with a top-25 Canadian spa, sixty rooms outside Cambridge, Ontario. It rewards people who want the grounds to be the destination, not a fast city address.