Heckfield Place is the antidote to modern life

All I wanted growing up was to escape my drab suburb for an electric city like New York or LA. I craved a life that felt bigger. I loved being around people with ambition, creativity, and a willingness to do unconventional things with their lives.

Still, despite all there is to love about both cities (this is not a NY/LA hit piece), I’ve become much more aware of how important nature, slowing down, and time away from constant input (technology) are to me.

Many of us now live in a near-constant state of stimulation and abstraction, moving between screens, notifications, meetings, traffic, and algorithmically optimized experiences. I think many people are craving not only relief from this, but also a more grounded, sensory, hands-on relationship with the world around them.

You can see this desire showing up in the popularity of film cameras, sourdough starters, gardening, baking, knitting, pottery, record players. These trends can seem aesthetic or nostalgic, but I think they point to something deeper. Many of the things people are gravitating toward right now require more effort, patience, skill, and participation than their modern alternatives. (And importantly, are low/no tech.)

Somewhere in the last few years, I’ve developed an apparently sincere desire to own a farm. My dream is to live on acres of land, with animals and a garden. I want fresh air, birdsong, fresh veggies and chickens. I want to decorate my home with fresh cut flowers that I grew and antique furniture that I’ve collected. I want to give my neighbors fresh eggs (I want to know my neighbors!). I want my kids to grow up playing with worms in the dirt with other kids like I did.

To be clear, I’m almost certainly romanticizing this vision. Farming is hard work, and I suspect the reality involves considerably more mud, gross smells, and back breaking manual labor than my imagination allows. Perhaps what I find so appealing is the promise of a life built around tending things rather than merely consuming them.

We expect frictionless products and experiences. In many ways, life has become extraordinarily convenient. But, have we unintentionally stripped away some of the very activities that once gave shape, meaning, and texture to everyday life?

I arrived at Heckfield Place exhausted.

It was my first real vacation of the year, and I hadn’t come with much of a plan beyond wanting a few quiet days in the English countryside. I knew the property was beautiful, but I hadn’t done much research beforehand. On my first afternoon, I borrowed a pair of wellies from the boot room and attempted to use the illustrated map left in my room to navigate the walking trails around the estate. The map was beautiful and completely indecipherable to me (I’m a child of Google Maps, which I did in fact have to consult multiple times because I got lost).

Still, I had nowhere to be and nothing planned until dinner, so I started wandering. After many wrong turns and really no idea where I was going, I stumbled upon nearly a dozen cows from Home Farm (yes, Heckfield Place has a farm) grazing in a field. Guys…the first cow sighting…magical. They’re so freaking cute. I really don’t think we were designed to spend quite this much time indoors, staring at screens and sitting in meetings….

Heckfield Place is the passion project of billionaire Dr. Gerald Chan. Restoring the estate and transforming it into what it is today took ten years.

It’s obvious the hotel was designed by someone who cares deeply about how every detail shapes the guest experience, almost as if they were creating their dream home and hosting close friends and family rather than building a commercial hospitality project. The level of care behind even the smallest details was extraordinary.

On my first full day at the property, I went on an “ornamental gardening tour”, led by the Head Gardener, who has worked on the grounds for twenty years (since before Dr. Chan purchased it). She oversees the estate’s walled gardens and the hundreds of living plants and fresh flowers distributed throughout the guest rooms and common spaces.

The plants in guest bathrooms receive little natural light and begin to wilt after a few days. Of course, guests would never notice this because the gardening team continuously propagates, rehabilitates, rotates, and regrows replacement plants behind the scenes. Housekeeping monitors which rooms need swaps and coordinates with the gardening department, which maintains entire shelves of backup plants specifically for this purpose. Every few days, plants are cycled out, restored, and replaced again across all 40+ rooms on the property.

From a purely operational perspective, almost none of this makes sense. Did guests even notice, or care? I loved the fresh flowers and large plants in my room, but would I have noticed if there was no plant in the bathroom? Why have a major gardening operation for a small, possibly invisible, bathroom plant?

Surely it would be easier, cheaper, and more efficient to use fake plants, lower-maintenance greenery, or eliminate them entirely. Surely the gardening team had plenty of other (more important) things demanding their attention.

But, at Heckfield Place, nature is inseparable from the identity of the property. The hotel’s philosophy is rooted in connection to the land. A guest may never consciously notice the plant in the bathroom, but removing it would make the property less aligned with its own values. The effort behind “Operation Bathroom Plant” revealed the embodiment of HP’s philosophy through even the smallest details.

One of the first things I noticed arriving at Heckfield was the absence of a traditional hotel lobby. There was no reception or line of guests waiting to check in. Instead, you entered through a wooden front door into what felt like the mudroom of a large country home, with coats, tricycles, muddy wellies and luggage at the interior entrance.

At first, I was a little thrown off. Haven’t we all been conditioned (by our mothers) to know shoes should be put away and clutter hidden from sight?

But, as I continued to pass by the entrance over the next few days, the house felt a little less like a hotel and a little more like a home. People seemed comfortable here.

What would traditionally be considered the front desk was instead referred to as “the study,” a quiet room staffed by just a few people.

The estate, including the guest rooms, is filled with pieces from the owner’s personal art collection. Several pieces were unexpectedly bold for a countryside property, which made the space feel more personal and lived in.

Each afternoon, tea and cake were served in one of the sitting rooms. Guests sat quietly reading books, drinking tea, working on puzzles, or simply staring out the windows at the grounds. It was adorable. My favorite part of the house was the wellies room, with an entire wall of boots you could take at any time and a closet full of Barbour jackets and scarves to borrow at your leisure. Again, it felt like borrowing essentials from a friend’s closet.

Pre-Heckfield, I loved properties that communicated through WhatsApp or hotel apps because, if I’m honest, sending a text was often faster and easier than calling the front desk.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that Heckfield had neither. To sign up for a tour and arrange a taxi, I had to call or walk over to the study to speak to someone in person.

The small interactions with the staff shaped my stay (especially because I was traveling alone). I laughed with the bartender after another guest accidentally stole my wine. At Marle, one of the farm-to-table restaurants on the estate, a waiter persuaded me to order a beet and pea salad I never would have chosen myself. It ended up being my favorite thing I ate on the trip (I literally don’t like beets. These beets were AMAZING. They were sweet!).

So, of course there was no WhatsApp concierge. Because Heckfield certainly did not want to keep guests glued to their phones or make every interaction instantaneous. That was not the point of staying here.

At the same time, the operational details guests actually do find disruptive seemed to disappear almost entirely. For example, I never signed or saw a bill until I checked out. Everything was automatically charged to my room. I found this delightful because I could leave the table when I was finished eating and I didn’t worry about what I was spending (or have to decipher what was appropriate tip culture outside of the US).

And, I can only describe the experience with housekeeping as magical. At many hotels, the logistics behind your experience aren’t exactly hidden. There’s housekeeping carts parked in hallways, knocking on the door at 8 a.m. (while you’re trying to sleep in for once!!), returning to your room after being out all day to find it still hasn’t been cleaned.

Here, I literally did not see any housekeeping staff in the hallways during my entire stay, yet when I returned from breakfast in the mornings or dinner in the evenings, my room was perfectly refreshed. I am convinced the staff were using secret tunnels and tracking my movements through the hallway cameras ;)

When I checked into my room, there was a printed itinerary waiting on the desk suggesting activities happening around the estate, along with restaurant reservations I hadn’t booked yet. Small detail, but it meant I didn’t have to spend mental energy figuring out what to do, where to go, or planning my days. Speaking of reducing cognitive load… the SPA!!! Ya’ll, it was amazing. It has an extremely strict no-phone policy (before you can enter you have to lock your phone away in a phone locker). Combined with the absence of clocks throughout the spa facilities, it was tech free bliss!!

The intuitive massage itself was incredible. Instead of immediately sending guests back into the world, the therapist brought me into a dimly lit room, lit a candle, and explained that I could simply rest there until the candle burned out about twenty minutes later. A buffer space between deep relaxation and re-entering reality :0

But truly the most magical aspect of Heckfield Place is Home Farm. It is quite literally so magical. Home Farm is a fully biodynamic farm, recognizing that all life has a role to play in growing the best food possible. Biodynamic farmers plan planting, pruning, and harvesting activities around lunar and planetary cycles. Yes, it sounds very woo-woo, but these ideas existed across many ancient farming cultures.

There is a dairy onsite with 42 cows who produce milk, cream, butter and yogurts for the estate. And will you believe this: the cows get a mat leave of three months where they are rehabilitated before going through another birthing and milking cycle. More time off than women in the US have!!! Exploring Home Farm and the woodlands surrounding the property brought me so much joy and healed my nervous system. Please enjoy my photo diary below :)

I would have moved in if I could, but alas, I had to move onto my next destination. But, I’ve thought about this place every day since I left (maybe they will invite me back?).

In a time where so much of modern life feels optimized for speed, stimulation, convenience, and extraction, Heckfield is a reminder that we feel better, mentally and physically, when we live a little more in harmony with nature, with one another, and with the natural rhythms modern life so often pulls us away from.

Thank you for reading. Please (I beg) share any farm or nature or offline stay recs in the comments - I’m on the hunt. I’m sharing many more photos from my trip on instagram too. See you next time!

Hi, I’m Waverly, based in LA and hotel-obsessed. I’m usually traveling, planning a trip, photographing hotels, interviewing people shaping hospitality or writing my next Substack. I’m glad you’re here!