What’s the draw?
People warn you about Grantley Hall before you visit. A colleague spoke in hushed tones about its perfect Negronis. Another of the featherlight finger sandwiches. My partner’s mother whispered about the spa too, where legend insists the cryotherapy chamber can erase even the most ruinous hangover induced by reckless quantities of Whispering Angel. Did I heed any of this? Of course not.
Located on the eastern fringes of the Yorkshire Dales, Grantley Hall is a 47-bedroom hotel and the sparkling outcome of one very lucrative divorce. Owner Valeria Sykes poured £70m into transforming this 17th-century Palladian pile into a five-star hotel, which opened in 2019. Its tagline is “the difference is in the detail,” and you sense every last coin has been deployed to make that stick. The 18-metre indoor pool has a vaulted roof designed to nod to the nearby Fountains Abbey.
Grantley Hall superior suite
Each wing of the hotel has its own bespoke scent. Toilet seats are heated to prevent buttock trauma on entry. Bedrooms have the square footage of London flats that would confidently advertise to sleep twelve. My suite came with a duvet as thick as double cream, a pillow and robe menu (that’s a first), a television disguised as an oil painting and – on the bookshelf – essential reading that runs the gamut from Becoming by Michelle Obama to the Vogue Essentials guide to lingerie.
Should you manage to put down the page-turning guide to underwire, there’s a spa regularly cited as one of the best in the country. Here, the usual sauna-and-jacuzzi template is expanded with a Nordic spa garden, snow room, indoor-to-outdoor hydrotherapy pool, and an Elite gym stocked with niche contraptions, including an underwater treadmill and a bone density scanner.
If you’d rather not know the strength of your skeleton, there’s also an alpine-inspired aprés tent, The Orchard, acres of grounds to wander and a wood-panelled wine tasting room. The latter sits worryingly close to cabinets of jewellery – one assumes more than a few pearls have been purchased under the lubrication of Veuve Clicquot.
What to eat
With five restaurants and three bars for 47 bedrooms, it’s safe to say nobody leaves Grantley famished. For Michelin-starred-fare, there’s Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall and for more traditional comforts (and something stiff to drink), there is Fletchers Restaurant and the Norton Bar & Courtyard.
The Darwin drawing room
I ate instead at EightyEight, a restaurant accessed via a spiral staircase beneath a cocktail bar. A savoury Tochaku cocktail, made from Roku, Ancho Reyes, kimchi juice, and tomato cordial, sets the tone for umami-rich pan-Asian plates: yellowfin tuna tataki, followed by halibut with king prawn toast and a fragrant green curry sauce, and a delicate yuzu and almond cake.
For the decision-phobes, there’s an eight-course tasting menu featuring all the EightyEight favourites, including char siu quail and black peppered dry-aged beef fillet with ox cheek and maitake.
When you’re not eating lunch or dinner, there is afternoon tea served in the Drawing Room (a fair reward for the marathon distances involved in getting from suite to spa), Valeria’s champagne and cocktail bar or spa-side bowls of saintly quinoa.
Breakfast, meanwhile, is served in Norton Bar & Courtyard – a spread of classics padded out with daily specials including tortilla with citrus crème fraîche and oscietra caviar, or a smoked trout crumpet with poached egg and beurre blanc. Bring your statins and a forgiving waistband.
What to do
Three graces spa
The Three Graces Spa and the adjacent gym are destinations in their own right – so much so that locals flock to Grantley Hall daily as members or for a spa day. The treatments range from massage to manicures (including gentlemen’s options) and an encyclopaedia of facials. Outside, the estate’s 30 acres contain a vegetable garden, meadows with cows, an English Heritage-listed Japanese garden and a croquet lawn.
If the weather isn’t playing ball, there’s an indoor professional motorsport simulator for the petrolheads and chef cookery demonstrations for gastronomes. Fancy something totally out of the box? Book a bespoke genealogy experience with local genealogists Phil and Bev from Folk Finders to unearth your family history and bring the story to life with a personal guided tour to ancestral homes, churches or graveyards.
If you somehow tire of Grantley’s charms, Ripon Cathedral and Fountains Abbey are on the doorstep, while Harrogate’s antiques and tearooms are half an hour away. The question is whether you’ll ever want to stray further than your heated loo seat.
Need to know
Cost: From £655 per night
Address: Grantley Hall, Ripon, HG4 3ET
Nearest town: Harrogate
Getting there:
Trains from London Kings Cross to Harrogate 3 hours plus a 20 minute taxi
To book: grantleyhall.co.uk
