SOHO FARMHOUSE

PIGLET ROOMS

FROM

STUDIO CABINS

FROM has re-written that old adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” to read “if it ain’t broke make 2,000 more of them”.

And so we come to Soho Farmhouse, a valiant attempt by urbanites to rebrand the countryside into something a bit more manageable and less smelly. There are no cow pats here, no barbed wire fences or industrialised milking parlours or anaerobic digestion plants. Instead, there is a 100-acre site near Chipping Norton, which appears to have been flattened and then re-landscaped into a series of asphalted pathways leading to bleak grey barn buildings with the odd carefully manicured hillock.

There is a strange absence of trees or mature hedgerows or anything that could make it look slightly less like a demilitarised zone, by way of the Teletubbies.

Guests leave their cars at reception and then wait for a milk cart driven by a handsome off-duty male model in a Barbour jacket to deposit them at their rooms. I was taken to a Piglet.

“Originally, we wanted to call them Pigsties,” the handsome male model explained, “but that didn’t sound great.”

The Piglet turned out to be half of a wooden Nissen hut, surrounded by lots of other wooden Nissen huts, as if I have wandered on to an abandoned Second World War airfield. I was led to my half of the hut and shown two Pashley bicycles propped up by the entrance, each painted an exceptionally perfect shade of turquoise. I am told that this is how most people get around Soho Farmhouse, although if it’s pouring with rain then a handsome off-duty male model dressed in a Barbour jacket will come and collect you in a vehicle.

I’m sure the intent is to make guests relax and disconnect from the outside world, but it seems curiously infantilising, as if we’re all part of some bizarre social experiment overseen by the Soho House panopticon.

My room was small but wellfurnished. There are plenty of nice touches – full-sized bottles of shampoo and shower gel in the bathroom; pre-mixed cocktails in the bar – and a few things that I found irritating. The lighting was so low I might as well have been in a cave. It was very hot. The whole room was heated to such a sluggish temperature that I immediately wanted to crawl into bed and languish there like a hibernating tortoise.

There was no free bottled water until bedtime, when a measly can of the stuff appeared at my bedside (this is how trendy places serve their water nowadays, no doubt out of respect for the oceans and David Attenborough). The result was that I felt almost permanently dehydrated. Also the washbasin was tiny and splashed everywhere.

The good things are the same good things that exist in every Soho House I’ve ever been to: the food is a solid eight out of 10 and there’s lots of it on offer (six separate places to eat, including Pen Yen, the beautifully appointed Japanese fusion restaurant in what is humble-braggingly called The Boathouse); the staff are uniformly helpful and efficient, and the soft furnishings are all nicely done in muted velvety shades of green and purple and mustard. There are picturesque open fires and casually slung blankets and pairs of Hunter wellington boots provided for the guests, so that the whole place ends up feeling less like an actual

GOOD LIFE The food, far left, and Piglet rooms, left, were good but the Farmhouse disappointed