If you like Limewood and Soho Farmhouse, you’ll love this hotel

My recent trip to the Thyme “lifestyle brand with country house hotel” reminded me of a friend who works at a spa in New York and once handed a questionnaire to the curmudgeonly Lou Reed on his arrival. It was swiftly returned with a giant X across it.

Whenever I am given the paperwork before a spa treatment, asking about my current stress levels, I wish I had far better penmanship and could draw a caricature of a bearded middle-aged man screaming into a cushion. No one who knows me would ever describe me as “laid back”. I do myself no favours by having four shots of espresso as breakfast and treating every day as an elastic entity in which I allocate 20 minutes to a journey that I know takes at least a third longer. 

When I arrived at Thyme on the edge of the Cotswolds one sunny weekday afternoon recently, I was already frazzled from morning appointments that had involved crossing London twice, and a deadline missed despite typing furiously on the train. I paused for a moment as I walked through the garden courtyard leading to reception. “Oh, these are some of my favourite flowers” (long, tall Verbena bonariensis, with thin stems that lead to small clouds of purple that seem to float in the air).

Then I stomped to the bar, plonked myself down on a sofa surrounded by ornamental sheep (it’s called the Baa Bar), opened my laptop again and ordered a glass of Salus Napa chardonnay. “Oh,” I thought, “this is one of my favourite wines – and a surprise to see available by the glass because people still think oaked chardonnay is evil, but they are wrong.”

Two glasses later, having fended off the last email of the day, I resigned myself to being present and actually enjoying what I hadn’t properly acknowledged was an extraordinarily lovely hotel. 

Thyme has been shaped out of a once-derelict manor and farmhouse, turned into perhaps the most impressive example of the ever-burgeoning genre of modern luxury country retreats. If you like Lime Wood and Soho Farmhouse, you will love this. There’s a cookery school, an art gallery and  an events space, and the architecture is fairy-tale dreamy. Whoever planned the gardens has an inspired sense of colour and visual rhythm. And the Burleigh Black Regal Peacock ceramics they use to serve tea and coffee are gorgeous. I am now that man who posted a flat white to Instagram.

I was at Thyme primarily for the spa, or rather the new Botanical Bothy; a pretty little self-contained cottage with a green polished plaster interior and soft-curved heated slabs: a hammam by way of Capability Brown. You don’t get the standard 60 minutes of full body massage; instead you are led through a guided meditation that resets your breathing with the focus on abdominal inhalation and elongated exhalation. There is a gentle foot scrub before your therapist sits you on one of the warm slabs, and traces lines with his or her fingers around your back and neck.

As Raquel talked me through what she was doing, in her soothing Spanish accent, every nerve ending in my back tingled with pleasure. She then had me lie face up and washed my hair. It felt ceremonial, as if I was a recently deceased Egyptian deity. Then I had a bubble bath in the garden outside and sat drinking herbal tea by a fire, next to a fountain, feeling wonderfully alive.

I rarely find spa treatments relaxing. After a massage, the therapist customarily tells me I have more knots in my back than they have ever encountered in a human. Usually, I spend my whole time on the table going through To Do lists in my head, or snoring. The Botanical Bothy actually Did Something. 

I’ve been told by numerous personal trainers that my breathing is ruinous to any workout. I often just… stop doing it. Raquel focused mainly on this and it was key to the end result.

I look forward to coming back for a long weekend. Spa aside, the food at the restaurant – the Ox Barn – is some of the best I have eaten this year, and the space itself is impressive: both vast and cosy. My smoked trout with caviar and the roast brill with potatoes that followed were flawless. The only reason Thyme isn’t a perfect 10 for me is that I didn’t like the faux handwritten typography on the menus. But even that didn’t really stress me out.

Double rooms from £400, including breakfast. There is one fully accessible room – Nettle (01367 850174; thyme.co.uk)

Read more: The best spa hotels in Britain for 2023