Hotel Glasshouses – A New Luxury Hospitality Trend

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Luxury, British greenhouse and glasshouse manufacturer Hartley Botanic is experiencing a new and growing demand for its custom-made glasshouses amongst high-end hoteliers. Hotels including Oxfordshire’s Belmond Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons and the Forest Side Hotel & Restaurant in the Lake District have added a Hartley Botanic glasshouse to their properties as another way to attract today’s luxury guest – customers who are interested in unique experiences and in the very best dining.

A unique, luxury experience

The definition of luxury hospitality has evolved. Ostentatious glamour has been replaced by incredibly personal services and unique experiences. A greenhouse or glasshouse in hotel grounds not only supplies a restaurant kitchen with the freshest of ingredients, it can also provide the stepping-off point for an exclusive guest offer which is totally individual to a particular property or brand.

Belmond Le Manoir’s impressive Grand Manor glasshouse has allowed food visionary Raymond Blanc to fulfil an original ambition for a hotel-based gardening school which brings together Le Manoir’s famous organic gardens and foodie credentials. Within the Victorian glasshouse, guests can learn how to grow the kind of edible produce sighed over every in day in the hotel’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Head Gardener Anne Marie Owens said: “Raymond is passionate about sharing knowledge. And we realised guests are really interested in how things are grown. They love seeing the vegetable garden and understanding what the chefs do with the produce. So he said, “Let’s do this”. After the cookery school it seemed an obvious next step to develop a gardening school.”

Forest Side Hotel’s lean-to Hartley Botanic greenhouse adds to the hotel’s Victorian storytelling and its aim to give guests a true experience of a historic mansion, but with twenty-first century comforts. In both its form and function the greenhouse, situated within the hotel’s verdant one-acre kitchen garden, is reminiscent of a traditional working greenhouse in a stately home or private estate. As well as adding to the hotel’s well-defined brand and character, the greenhouse is also an integral part of Forest Side’s private garden tours – a unique and exclusive horticultural draw for guests.

The very best dining

Outstanding food and drink is increasingly becoming an integral part of the luxury experience and hotels are investing in this more and more for guests. Within the luxury sector there has been a transition in what constitutes excellent food, from an appetite for formal, fine dining to a focus on individual ingredients and their provenance. Seen first in the restaurant sector, the demand for farm-to-fork eating positions home grown capability as the new mark of quality. Today’s luxury diner not only expects the best chefs, they also want the freshest, most seasonal and most thoughtfully sourced produce – embodied in its purest form when restaurants produce ingredients themselves.

Belmond Le Manoir and Forest Side Hotel’s working glasshouses mean guests can enjoy delicious dishes cooked with the freshest and most delicious ingredients, available throughout the year and intimately tied to the individual properties. Hotel-grown produce guarantees ingredients’ taste, quality and can ensure they are certifiably organic. Ingredients’ provenance is completely transparent, providing an authenticity highly valued by modern consumers when it comes to how their food is made. Chefs are involved in picking their own ingredients, which not only means ‘just out of the ground’ freshness, it also adds to the creative culinary process, allowing talented chefs to create hotel signature dishes from seasonal harvests or particularly splendid individual crops.

In addition to the taste and quality benefits, hotel-grown food is perfect for the modern, ‘conscious consumer’. Guests today are motivated by products or services which are proven to be sustainable and which are of minimal impact to the planet. A farm-to-fork approach not only minimises food waste, as chefs just take what they need, it also dramatically cuts food miles involved in sourcing ingredients externally.

Growing their own is an incredibly personal approach for hoteliers which ties-into the luxury hospitality zeitgeist of going the extra mile for guests with those all important details – as well as providing a nostalgic and characterful stamp of uniqueness on each individual hotel brand.

Why a Hartley glasshouse?

Celebrating its 80th Anniversary this year, Hartley Botanic is one of the UK’s oldest and most trusted greenhouse and glasshouse manufacturers. The company was the first to develop and make a solely glass and aluminium structure and is the Royal Horticultural Society’s recommended aluminium greenhouse and glasshouse supplier. All Hartley Botanic’s glasshouses and greenhouses are handmade to match customers’ specific growing needs and requirements using the finest materials and representing the highest level of engineering design. From the stainless-steel capping screws and durable polyester coated finish, to extruded aluminium alloy sections, each element of a Hartley Botanic greenhouse speaks of fine workmanship and a commitment to enduring strength, longevity and performance. Some of Hartley Botanic’s original structures are still standing and in full use, such as the greenhouse at Belgrave Hall, installed in 1950 and Glasgow Botanical Garden’s glasshouse installed in 1988. The company offers a 30 year ‘lifetime’ guarantee which covers both the structure and installation of its greenhouses.

For more information please visit: www.hartley-botanic.co.uk or call 01457 819 155.