How an English country haven inspired playwright Nina Raine

Writers have long decamped to hotels to work. That’s their story, anyway. After the success of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov promptly moved to the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace on Lake Geneva, where he finished Pale Fire—and stayed for the rest of his life. Evelyn Waugh regularly wrote at Easton Court in Chagford, Devon, taking only his manservant. On his first night there in January 1944, he completed 1,300 words of Brideshead Revisited. While he was away on another trip, his favourite daughter Margaret came down with suspected mercury poisoning; her headmistress, when she telephoned the hotel, was firmly told that Waugh couldn’t be disturbed.

With these thoughts—and without my two-and-five-year-olds—I arrived at the fabulous Heckfield Place. I can’t live there, sadly, but I can pretend.

A sumptuously reappointed Georgian mansion in the north Hampshire countryside, Heckfield is in the neighbourhood of Jane Austen’s last home. Bought in 2002 by the billionaire philanthropist Gerald Chan, the house has an intoxicating and surprising mix of aesthetic that makes me wonder whether it is telling me its own story—that of Chan and his passions, and the next chapter of Heckfield’s life. Its bones are classical, but the interior is a mix of Scandi chic and modern farmhouse, designed by Ben Thompson, a protégé of Ilse Crawford. It also acts as a gallery space for Chan’s incredible collection of art: 432 pieces and counting. The works that hang here—largely British 20th-century and contemporary—are frequently changed, and a leather-bound iPad in each room catalogues the collection punctiliously.

Our room has lovely details. The drawers of the cabinet adjoining the minibar slide out to display leather pockets containing brass tea-making implements and a spoon made out of horn. I walk into the bathroom and realise I haven’t yet seen a single piece of plastic; everything is in delicate wooden boxes or wicker baskets. Who knew being ecologically sound was so elegant? The light-coloured wood and linen save the rooms from feeling antiseptic, as do quirky rustic touches—the vases of fresh wildflowers, a brown paper bag of walnuts posed artfully on a black metal tray with a statuesque nutcracker. Even the fire extinguishers are made of brushed copper.

And everywhere, there is illumination. Movement-sensitive lights warm to a glow around your feet when you walk into the bathroom at night, and there are soft spotlights throughout. The effect is deeply relaxing.

My experience is that even the tiniest hotel room has a remarkably focusing effect on writing. You’re not surrounded by your usual guilt-inducing clutter, and you don’t have to think about food until the moment you sit down to eat it. This one, however, takes you to a whole other level of Zen.

Hotels can also inspire a story—often, a dark one: think of the opening of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, with the troubled couple staying in Venice. They grow so used to the invisible presence of the maid tidying away their daily squalor that when they return too early one day and find the room in exactly the dishevelled state they left it, they cannot cope with the affront to their senses.

As it happens, I’ve been writing and developing a TV series partly based on Jane Austen’s own life. Coincidentally, Austen knew the original owner of Heckfield Place, Mrs Lefevre, who attended the ball at which the author flirted with a young Irishman called Tom Lefroy (an incident she writes about in her earliest surviving letter of January 1796). The property was designed with the path of the sun in mind: the ‘morning room’, where there is a table with a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle, gets the early rays, while the glasshouse dining room is at the other end, catching the sunset. I think how easy Austen had it. No need for contrived coincidences: a whole plot can revolve around a collection of people staying in a house, trying to amuse themselves, naturally encountering one another in varying combinations, falling in and out of love over games of cards or tea.

And of course, there’s the Agatha Christie-esque murder in the country manor, where all the guests are suspects. I’m also writing a show about a serial killer; in one episode, the murder takes place at a spa hotel. I jog around the scenic grounds, seeking out a location for the crime. There are two beautiful lakes below the house and a sign warning ‘Deep Water’. A convenient drowning, perhaps?

A few fields away, I find Heckfield’s impressive market garden, with its many greenhouses and polytunnels, fudge-coloured Guernsey cows that provide the golden butter and—bingo—several black saddleback pigs. They can dispense with the body.

But it is Heckfield’s food that furnishes the most vivid details for my murderer. Because she also happens to be a gourmand, I think she would really like it here. When we enter the glasshouse restaurant, Marle, we’re struck first by the beauty of the powder-pink exposed brickwork behind one bar, then the green-veined chunk of marble of the second, and finally by the incredible food. After all, Skye Gyngell is the culinary director, and much of the produce is from Fern Verrow farm. A melt-in-the-mouth Culatello di Zibello (cured meat from Parma) is followed by smoky cuttlefish with carrot shavings, full of sunlit brightness. Our lunch at Hearth, the more informal restaurant below, is even better. It’s rare for a menu to undersell its wares, but ‘mussels with wild garlic’ does not even begin to do justice to this incredible dish, with splashes of green oil and tiny charred leeks.

As with Gyngell’s London restaurant Spring, all the produce is farmed in line with biodynamic principles, meaning herbal remedies are used instead of fertiliser. The plants are cultivated according to the phases of the moon: ‘leaf days’ and ‘root days’, solstices and equinoxes. In the 1800s, there were pineapples and grapes grown year-round in the fire-heated glasshouses. Now, there is the luxury of a plant hospital, to revivify the vegetation parched through its decorative service in the hotel.

Sitting in the morning-room on our last day, I look up at the glass grapes on the chandelier, then at the fresh gourds and pumpkins adorning the alcoves of the room. In this house, the past truly co-exists with the present.

Someone should write a story about it.

This piece originally appeared in the print edition of Harper's Bazaar UK.

All images from: heckfield_place/Instagram