Cowley Manor Experimental

Cowley Manor is an Italianate house of 1855, built on the site of an early seventeenth-century manor beside the small church of St Mary's, with a long balustraded terrace above lawns that fall to a lake. The Paris-based Experimental Group bought it in 2022 and reopened it in July 2023 after a full refurbishment by Dorothée Meilichzon, who took the house's Lewis Carroll legend as her cue: chequerboard patterns, a panelled restaurant hung with paper lanterns, and painted murals of trees and water in the Garden Room.

The house holds 36 bedrooms, a restaurant, the Experimental Cocktail Club Cotswolds, a lounge, a games room and the C-Side spa, across 55 acres of grounds. Three rooms in the main house take private dinners and meetings: the Garden Room, the largest, opens onto a reserved stretch of the terrace; the Study keeps the desk where the Horlicks recipes were written; the Library is kept for drinks by the fire.

For a larger occasion the restaurant, bar and terrace can be privatised, and the whole manor can be taken exclusively with all 36 bedrooms and its public rooms. The house hosts weddings, brand launches and milestone birthdays, with the restaurant seating up to 100 at its Marble table layout and the events team quoting gatherings of up to 150 guests.