Gravetye Manor

Gravetye Manor was built in 1598 for Richard Infield and his bride Katharine Compton, and their initials are still cut into the stone above the garden door. The gardener William Robinson bought the house and its thousand acres in 1885 and lived there until 1935, and much of what he wrote about the English natural garden was worked out in these beds and meadows. Peter Herbert opened it as a hotel and restaurant in 1958, and since 2010 it has been owned by Jeremy Hosking, who restored the structure and the walled kitchen garden.

The restaurant holds a MICHELIN star. It sits in a glass-fronted contemporary dining room on the garden side of the house, and the menus follow what the kitchen garden produces through the year. The older rooms are panelled in oak, with carved fireplaces and ornate plaster ceilings.

For a private party there are two wood-panelled dining rooms: the Private Dining Room, with a single round table for up to ten, and the Panelled Room, one long oval table beside a fireplace for up to 22. The whole house can also be taken exclusively, with seventy seated in the dining room, ceremonies in the main sitting room, an evening reception for ninety and all seventeen bedrooms for the party to stay.