Homewood Park Hotel & Spa - Bath

Homewood Park Hotel & Spa - Bath

The road out of Bath towards Freshford drops into the Limpley Stoke Valley within fifteen minutes of the city, and Homewood appears on Abbey Lane, a wisteria-hung Bath stone house with ten acres of gardens and woodland falling away towards the Avon. The main house is Georgian with Victorian additions, though its foundations are said to date to the thirteenth century, when the land reportedly belonged to Hinton Priory, the Carthusian house founded in 1232 by Ela, Countess of Salisbury, whose remains still lie on private land near Hinton Charterhouse. For years it traded as Homewood Park, passing out of the collapsed Von Essen group to Longleat Enterprises in 2011, before Ian and Christa Taylor, Bath hoteliers who left the corporate hotel world to build their own small group, bought it in August 2018, dropped the “Park,” and relaunched it in 2020. There are now 31 rooms and suites across the main house, a converted mews and The Lookout, a hideaway with its own hot tub added in 2026, and the hotel holds one Michelin Key, alongside sister properties Bishopstrow in Warminster and Dukes and The Bird in Bath, all run under the Taylors’ Kaleidoscope Hotels. Inside, the Taylors have done the opposite of what most Georgian houses near Bath do with their architecture, filling the rooms with art the couple chose themselves, a wall of clocks, a dining room hung with chandeliers, a yellow submarine in the grounds and a topiary teddy bear on the lawn. The Luxe Hot Tub Suite leans Art Deco, beds come with Hypnos mattresses, and bathrooms are stocked with Wildsmith. Olio, the restaurant, cooks Mediterranean-leaning food with Somerset produce and vegetables from the hotel’s own kitchen garden, built around sharing platters, a Somerset cheeseboard and, in summer, an outdoor kitchen and pizza oven on the terrace, with the Valentine’s Bar next door and afternoon tea served daily. The spa has an indoor hydrotherapy pool, a heated outdoor pool, sauna, steam and a vitality pool, and spa access is included for every overnight guest. This is a country house hotel that wants you to smile, and for the most part it earns it, because the playfulness comes from two owners with decades in the trade rather than a branding agency. Families with small children, couples with dogs, and groups celebrating something will all feel welcome here, and the staff treat all three with the same ease. The cost of that openness is noise. The spa takes day guests and members, weddings and parties are part of the business, and on a Saturday in summer the terrace has the energy of a busy restaurant, not a hushed retreat. The whimsy, too, can tip into the insistent, not the kind of considered editorial restraint you might want from a small boutique hotel, but the valley views and the outdoor pool do a great deal of the work. You should not come if you want silence, adults-only calm or interiors that recede. You should come for a long weekend with people you like, a dog who likes walks, a spa you can use from check-in to check-out, and a lane that leads straight into some of the best walking country around Bath. The short version: A 31-room Georgian country house hotel and spa in Freshford, south-east of Bath, owned by Ian and Christa Taylor since 2018, with ten acres above the Avon Valley, a Mediterranean-leaning restaurant, indoor and outdoor pools, and an interior full of the owners’ own art.