Hotel Hit Squad: Inside Park House, West Sussex – 'One could imagine it as the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie murder mystery'
I wrote recently in this column about a disastrous romantic break many moons ago in the Mermaid Inn in Rye. What I failed to mention was that the weekend ended with my about-to-be-ex boyfriend pulling up on Wandsworth Bridge and ejecting me from the Morgan we had hired for the trip. He maintains to this day (he’s still a friend, amazingly) that I was too unbearable to remain in it a moment longer.
In between leaving the Mermaid and exiting the car, Philip suggested we drop in at a girls’ prep school to see his sister Lui, who was working there as an undermatron in her gap year. I thought she was dreadfully prim; she thought I was a tarty show-off. How, from that poor start, we became the greatest of friends, as close as sisters, is lost in the mists of time – but we did.
Every year, Lui, Sarah (also a lifelong friend) and I treat ourselves to a spoiling night away somewhere. It’s my job to choose the hotel, of course, and this year I plumped for Park House, which is celebrating 70 years of ownership by the same family.
“Park House? I don’t know it,” said Lui, emphatically. “I was rather hoping to return to that hotel in Sussex that you recommended to me a couple of years ago.”
“Park House is in Sussex.”
“Well, that wasn’t its name.”
I’m so fond of Park House, opened in 1949 by a splendid and charismatic character, a tiny dynamo called Ioné O’Brien. Brought up in India and passionate about polo, she gradually turned her inherited home into a hotel. After she died, the hotel passed to her grandson, Seamus, who invested in and upgraded his beloved grandmother’s property.
Much has changed since Ioné’s day, not least the addition of a converted barn for meetings and weddings, the cottages in the grounds that have become nine bedrooms and the sleek spa with indoor and outdoor pools, but Park House still retains the tranquillity and graciousness of a family home.
Dogs and children are still welcome in equal measure. The honesty bar remains and the walls in the bar are plastered, as they always have been, with O’Brien family photographs and those of polo players (Ioné and her husband Michael had close connections with Cowdray Park) and celebrated past guests.
One could imagine the house as the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie murder mystery. There are 12 bedrooms in the main house (late Victorian, no beauty, but with roots in the Middle Ages) and unpacking in mine, No 2, on a wonderfully warm spring afternoon, I felt more Edwardian than baby boomer. In a room papered and curtained with blowsy white roses (country house style, yes, but too busy and frilly for today’s tastes) the windows look down on a long flower-covered pergola, a neat croquet lawn, a pair of grass tennis courts, a professionally designed, very testing six-hole pitch and putt golf course and an emerald putting green, all perfectly maintained.
The happy sound of children and of china teacups clinking against saucers wafted up from below. Beyond the lawns are long views on to a lovely wooded section of the South Downs with not another house in sight.
Park House isn’t perfect: the awkward dining room needs improving and softening (plans are afoot) and some of the bedrooms would benefit from a gently updated country house look. But if you find the likes of Heckfield Place and Beaverbrook too look-at-me and too expensive, then consider this peaceful, deeply relaxing address, the sort of place where delicious cooking smells waft up as you descend the stairs for dinner (no fireworks but very enjoyable, cooked with care by long-standing chef Callum Keir).
In the afternoon, Lui and Sarah had pampering Voya facials in the hotel’s attractive spa and they positively glowed like beacons at dinner. The next morning, I headed off for a Caudalie facial, which was essentially a divine head and face massage, with added lotions.
The three of us then swam, read, nattered and strolled in the grounds: the perfect girlie break. Except that, 46 years after we first met, we aren’t girlies any more and our memories aren’t what they were.
“I like Park House,” said Lui, as we prepared to leave. “Funnily enough, it reminds me of that other place, whose name I can’t remember.”
“It’s very good to have you back,” said the receptionist to Lui as we checked out. “I hope you enjoyed your stay as much as when you were here two years ago.”
Doubles from ￡135, including breakfast. Public areas and ground-floor cottage bedrooms are all accessible to wheelchair users, as are the levelled grounds outside.
