Rural retreats reimagined

The country house hotel is enjoying something of a renaissance. Demand for premium domestic holiday experiences is high and this has created opportunities for a new breed of hotel that offers high-end contemporary accommodation and dining alongside outdoor experiences and activities. Working with clients including new entrants and established operators over the full lifecycle of hotel development projects, we can provide support from initial concept through feasibility, design, planning and delivery. Rural Solutions has supported the reimagining of several well-loved country hotels for a new generation of guests including the boutique Stanley House in Lancashire, and the iconic Langdale Chase Hotel on the banks of Lake Windermere.

Objective

The creation of contemporary luxury serviced accommodation, facilities, and experiences in rural locations.

Approach

Both the Stanley House and Langdale Chase projects involved the redevelopment of established hotels to create new destination venues in sensitive rural locations.

At Stanley House Hotel our work was to enable the new purchaser to deliver a material redevelopment of this heritage hotel incorporating a Grade II* listed building. Planning consent was sought for a major expansion including a new spa complex and bedroom block to evolve the hotel into a luxury contemporary destination. A complex planning challenge given the sensitive location and heritage building required an approach that demonstrated Very Special Circumstances for the scale of development in green belt.

The Langdale Chase Hotel project required a similarly robust approach, with the added dimension of the site being in a National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage setting. Rural Solutions advised the client from post-purchase, through a pre-application enquiry to a planning consent for expansion and redevelopment of this highly sensitive tourism site to include refurbishment of the listed hotel, a new bedroom block and spa in its grounds and refurbishment of the boathouse.

In both cases, in addition to undertaking the planning application for the project, we prepared an Economic Impact Statement setting out the benefits to be delivered in terms of spend into the local economy and jobs created.

Both schemes achieved planning consent with the application approved unanimously by the Planning Committee.