James Leith

Luxury Goods: Spas

Hot, cold and lukewarm

The intended heading for this piece was to have been ‘Spa Wars’, since the demand for luxury pampering in country-house-hotel surroundings seems insatiable. Three country-house-hotel spas have opened within half an hour’s drive of here (on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire borders) in the last 18 months, and no expense spared. Even if you knew what thalassotherapy was, would you pay a pound a minute to get it? Or the same amount to reap the benefits of the Hammam bed? Apparently this last, being a sort of solid massage table, is butch enough to get men to agree to a pampering massage without feeling even a little bit gay.

But who are these customers? Who pays for a weekend in an incredibly luxurious hotel and never leaves the premises? Tim Haigh at Barnsley House says some of his customers stay in their rooms throughout, except for meals, and watch DVDs on the plasma screens and listen to CDs on the uber sound systems provided. Now he’s going to put in a spa, too.

In terms of top-end luxury, it doesn’t get much topper than Whatley (formerly Twhatley — no kidding) Manor, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Here the Swiss family Landolt are rumoured to have spent 23 million quid developing a country-house hotel that has 23 rooms and an ‘Aquarias Spa’ providing one of the largest hydrotherapy pools (whirl tub, body jets, neck massage fountain, underwater recliner) in Europe. Based more on Baden Baden than Scandinavia, you can wander from tepidarium (complete with internally heated stone mosaic loungers) to laconium (dry) and caldarium (steam) hot rooms or the Serail mud chamber before finishing up in the camomile steam grotto and the maracuja-scented ‘experience shower’. This is all before you even consider the treatments available. You could take the VIP suite for three hours for the Aquarias La Prairie Signature Experience, at £495 for two of you, and that’s before your retail therapy, where 3.4

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