Wilderness Reserve

Wilderness Reserve is a private estate of woodland, lakes and grazed pasture in the Yox Valley in Suffolk, about two hours from London. Its owners have spent years restoring the historic houses scattered across it, and it now lets 28 of them on an exclusive-use basis, from one-bedroom lakeside cottages to the manor at its centre.

That manor is Sibton Park, a Grade II* listed Georgian house designed by Decimus Burton. It sleeps 27 across 13 bedrooms. The ground floor keeps its formal reception rooms, among them a Drawing Room hung with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, while the basement holds a cinema, a games room, a cellar and a bar. A light-filled Orangery opens onto the parkland and a large lake.

For a larger party the estate opens its barns. Chapel Barn is a 15th-century Suffolk long barn with a stained-glass window, oak beams and a party room with its own bar on the garden floor. Blyth Barn, next door, runs to 22,500 square feet with two grand dining rooms and a sunken pool below its terrace. Weddings are taken on exclusive use of an estate and capped at ten a year on each, and the Estate Kitchen caters everything in-house. Further out there is a teepee site on the Chapel Barn lake and an ancient wood laid for fire-cooked dinners.