We are delighted to introduce our newest Considerate Hoteliers members – the recently opened and widely acclaimed Heckfield Place. Here they share their sustainability ethos and approach.
Heckfield Place is a living place. In a secluded corner of Hampshire, we’re a gentle Georgian home at the heart of 438 acres of a forever-evolving landscape. From the Upper and Lower Walled Gardens, an arboretum and sweeping pleasure grounds to the meandering River Whitewater and Upper and Lower Lakes, we’re a 45-room hotel that’s resolutely rooted in nature.
Centred on sustainability, Heckfield’s biomass centre powers water and central heating along with an aerobic digester that’s used to process all recyclable waste and provide compost for the garden. We harvest rain water used at our Home Farm – recently knitted back into the estate – for irrigation and washing down, while LED lamps are installed throughout all of the bedrooms and public areas. Heckfield also extracts 70,000 litres of water daily from a bore hole on the estate. Inside, we are aiming to be free of all single-use plastic and moving away from using the material in any part of the running of the hotel, including bottling our own water.
We are made by many. Skye Gyngell, our Culinary Director, who oversees Marle and open-flamed Hearth restaurants, is always looking for the purest way to capture the flavours of produce grown in good, clean soil. Which is why the market garden and orchards of our Home Farm follows biodynamic principles. Essentially an organic approach to growing food (so we never use chemical fertilisers and pesticides), biodynamic takes an even greater holistic step with food. It looks not only at the tangible realm of the soil, as our farming partner Jane Scotter from Fern Verrow farm explains, but also the unseen forces and energies of life and growth that permeate all living things. Our land also cultivates the flowers used throughout the elegant House where our floristry partner Kitten Grayson’s envisions plants and flowers as changing pieces of art within the hotel.
