Beaverbrook

Beaverbrook

The drive in from the Reigate Road, on the south-eastern edge of Leatherhead, climbs through beech and yew on the chalk of the Surrey Hills, twenty miles from central London and under an hour by train from Waterloo or Victoria, before the house comes into view, a cream French château-style mansion built between 1866 and 1870 for the Birmingham industrialist Abraham Dixon and rebuilt to the same design after a fire in 1893. Max Aitken, the Canadian-born owner of the Daily Express who became Lord Beaverbrook and later Churchill’s Minister of Aircraft Production, bought it in 1911 and lived there for half a century, filling it with Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Harold Macmillan, Ian Fleming and Elizabeth Taylor, and his widow stayed on until her death in 1994. In 2010 the estate, then still called Cherkley Court, was bought by Longshot, the company of Joel Cadbury and Ollie Vigors, with partners Tim Edwards and Ian Todd, who spent a reported £90 million, and several years fighting local campaigners over the golf course, turning it into a hotel and private members’ golf club, opening The House in 2017. There are now 56 rooms across 470 acres and four buildings: 18 in The House, 11 in the flint Garden House by the walled kitchen garden, six above the spa in The Coach House, and 21 in The Village, a cluster of cottages rebuilt in 2023 on the site of the estate’s Victorian workers’ housing, with the five-bedroom Dower House let separately. The art, and much of the house’s personality, comes from Sir Frank Lowe, the advertising veteran who serves as creative director. The interiors are split between Susie Atkinson, who did Babington House and the early Soho Houses, in The House and The Coach House, and Nicola Harding in The Garden House and The Village. Rooms in The House are named after Beaverbrook’s guests, so the Ian Fleming suite has a photograph of Roger Moore as Bond and the Dowager suite, Lady Beaverbrook’s old bedroom, keeps its original fireplaces and four-poster, while the hall carries a framed poem Kipling wrote for Beaverbrook beside a large Gerhard Richter tapestry from Lowe’s own collection. The library still holds Beaverbrook’s books, the private cinema he installed (reputedly the first in a British house) shows films chosen by Sir Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson, and Sir Frank’s Bar is done in a 1920s register. The Dining Room in The House is a Japanese grill, opened in 2017 by Taiji Maruyama, formerly of Nobu and Kiru, serving sashimi, tempura and meat and fish from the robata under double-height corniced ceilings; The Garden House cooks Anglo-Italian food from the kitchen garden and runs a cookery school; Mrs Beeton’s in The Village does pies and steak, egg and chips; and there is a pizzeria at the Coach House deli. The Coach House Spa was designed with the stained-glass artist Brian Clarke, whose ceiling throws coloured light across a 20-metre indoor pool, with an outdoor pool, hammam and six treatment rooms beyond, and the gardens, including the Italian Garden below the house, were reworked by Richard Bisgrove. Beaverbrook operates less like a country house than a small estate town, with golf buggies shuttling guests between buildings, golfers and spa members coming and going, and a programme that runs from hot air balloon tables in the Italian Garden in summer to an ice rink at Christmas. It is also, increasingly, a place for very large private parties, Tom Holland and Zendaya reportedly held their wedding reception here in August 2026. The House is where the history is felt most, Atkinson’s rooms making an Edwardian political salon feel lived in, with the bar and the library doing what they did for Beaverbrook’s guests; The Garden House is quieter and more domestic, with dogs allowed; The Village belongs to families, with bunk-bed suites and buggies of their own. The Japanese grill is an odd fit for a Surrey château and the best reason to eat in, and the spa is one of the better pieces of new design in an English country hotel. It suits Londoners who want a full country-house weekend without the drive to the Cotswolds, readers of twentieth-century history, and families who need the children occupied while they swim. You should not come if you want a small, hushed house where you are one of a dozen guests, because on a summer Saturday there may be a wedding, a golf day, a full spa and families in buggies, all at London prices, and the theatrics of the seasonal programme will not suit everyone. You should come for the house itself, for sleeping in a room named after someone who slept there, for dinner from the robata, for the light in the spa, and for the library where Churchill read, under an hour from town. The short version: A 56-room hotel and private golf estate across 470 acres of the Surrey Hills, built around Cherkley Court, Lord Beaverbrook’s home for fifty years, with interiors by Susie Atkinson and Nicola Harding, a Japanese grill in the main house and rooms named for the guests who once stayed there.