Hampton Manor – a Peel family manor reborn as a food estate

Twenty minutes from central Birmingham, where the suburbs of Solihull dissolve into Warwickshire pasture, Hampton Manor is a Grade II listed Gothic house built in 1855 for Frederick Peel, son of the two-time prime minister Robert Peel. Derelict by the time the Hill family bought the 45-acre estate in 2008, it has since been rebuilt, room by room, into a food-focused hotel of 24 individually designed bedrooms, a Victorian walled garden, an artisan bakery and a cookery school. The MICHELIN Guide awards the house Two MICHELIN Keys, and its principal restaurant, Grace & Savour, built into the walls of that same walled garden, holds a MICHELIN star for a tasting menu drawn almost entirely from British farms and shores. Run today by the Hills' son James and his wife Fjona, Hampton Manor trades the stiffness of the country-house template for something looser: cake at three, a vinyl hour, supper cooked over coals in an old furnace house.

01The house

Hampton-in-Arden passed into the Peel family when Robert Peel, twice prime minister, bought it as investment land; it was his son Frederick who, inheriting the estate and the family fortune, went into politics and — reviews find — built Hampton Manor itself in 1855. The resulting Gothic pile, complete with a clock tower, walled garden and rooms built for lavish entertaining, is now Grade II listed. By the early 2000s it had fallen out of use entirely; the hoteliers Derrick and Janet Hill acquired the Manor in March 2008, and their son James and his wife Fjona have run it ever since, rebuilding it almost from a shell.

The restoration leans on the Arts and Crafts sensibility of the house's own era: each bedroom is individually designed around William Morris's nature-inspired patterns, and the estate has worked with local artisans to make much of its own furniture and tableware, continuing what it calls a rebellion against industrial uniformity. The whole site now runs on 100% renewable energy, with biomass heating for the Manor House and ground-source systems for newer buildings.

02Rooms and suites

The estate's 24 bedrooms are spread across three distinct settings. The original Manor House offers fifteen luxury bedrooms with a modern nod to the Arts & Crafts era, each one named after a figure from the house's history — Robert Peel, George Fentham, Queen Eleanor, Lord Mowbray — ranging from generously proportioned Manor Suites with bay windows over the gardens to the smaller Manor Snug and Manor Cosy rooms, plus one ground-floor accessible room.

Insider tip

Direct trains from Birmingham (14 min) and London (under 2h); station a 7-minute walk from the gates.

Down by the kitchen garden, the Walled Garden Suites at Grace & Savour are built within the estate's former timber yard, each one themed around a wood craft — the Whittler, the Ebeniste, the Weaver — with hand-cast concrete baths and toiletries made locally by the apothecary Harvest; lounges look straight across to the restaurant's open kitchen. A third option, the Walled Garden Hideaway and its adjoining Coach House rooms, forms a dog-friendly cottage that sleeps up to eight and comes with its own kitchen, sun room and garden.

03Where to eat

Grace & Savour is built into the walls of the Victorian walled garden itself, an open-kitchen dining room serving a seasonal tasting menu built on soil health and British sourcing rather than imported luxury. Its chef director, David Taylor, started out under Glynn Purnell before working through kitchens in North America and Scandinavia, finishing at Maaemo in Norway as part of the team that won three Michelin stars there; his wife Anette, the restaurant director, made the same move from Norway to open the restaurant with him. As read on the estate's website in October 2026, dinner is a tasting menu running to around fourteen courses (Wednesday to Saturday, £195), with a shorter Essence Menu of around eight courses on Wednesdays and Thursdays (£125) and lunch on Fridays and Saturdays (£110).

The second restaurant, Kynd, occupies the walled garden's old furnace house and takes a more informal line: British produce cooked over coals, with lunch from Friday to Sunday (from £55) and dinner Friday to Tuesday (from £65), plus a fixed two-course supper club on Sunday evenings for £45. It is chef David Taylor's second restaurant on the estate, built on the same low-waste, farm-to-table principles as its Michelin-starred neighbour, but pared back to simpler, more generous plates. In warmer months both kitchens spill into the Victorian greenhouses and the garden itself for alfresco meals.

04The bar and the House Rhythm

Guests staying in the Manor House get what the estate calls its House Rhythm: an 11am Meet the Maker tour behind the scenes with the chefs, bakers and gardeners, an informal 4pm wine tasting called Swig, and Sweet Sounds at 3pm, when cake is brought out to a soundtrack of vinyl. The Manor House itself holds the bar, a library, games rooms and open fires, alongside a private tasting room used for dinners and events — all included free for anyone booking a Manor House room, with Walled Garden and cottage guests still getting Swig and Meet the Maker as standard.

Since 2015, the wine list across the estate has been shaped with the help of the merchant Wine Freedom, favouring small, low-intervention producers over famous labels; the approach won the estate the AA Wine List of the Year award in 2019 and still underpins the pairings at both restaurants today.

05The walled garden and wellbeing

Hampton Manor's food begins in its own walled garden, farmed without chemicals or pesticides and now moving towards biodynamic methods under the guidance of Dr Sally Bell, a member of the Hill family, who also runs wellness retreats on the estate. Bees kept across the village, including hives in the walled garden, supply honey sold through the bakery; grain comes from an organic farm in Lincolnshire, stone-milled at a working windmill before it reaches the ovens. The estate's sustainability work was recognised with a Green Tourism Gold Award in October 2025, and Grace & Savour was given three circles — a rating the estate says is matched only by L'Enclume — in the 360° Eat sustainability guide.

For quieter moments, the estate runs a treatment room for beauty and pampering alongside the gardens — best booked, by most accounts, for a mid-morning slot before the gardens and greenhouses fill up for lunch.

06The neighbourhood

Hampton-in-Arden is a small Warwickshire village of timber-framed houses and a parish church, with its own railway station offering direct trains to Birmingham in fourteen minutes and to London in under two hours; the estate is a flat, seven-minute walk from the platform. Birmingham Airport and the NEC exhibition centre are both roughly three to four miles away, making the Manor as plausible for a business stopover as for a weekend away, while the village pub and church remain within easy walking distance of the gates.

07Making the most of a stay

Grace & Savour's dine-and-stay diary for residents opens a full twelve months in advance online, while tables for non-residents open three months ahead — worth knowing if a particular date matters. Dog owners should book the Walled Garden Cottage, the estate's only pet-friendly accommodation, though dogs are not permitted upstairs in the Hideaway bedrooms, in the Manor House, or in either restaurant. Electric car charging on site runs on the same renewable energy that powers the rest of the estate, and the Manor's own concierge team will help build a stay around the garden tours, cookery school workshops and the bakery, as well as the two kitchens.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.