What hoteliers put in their bathrooms is more important than you can imagine, says Lucy Cleland

Call me shallow, but while I don’t necessarily judge a hotel by the thread count of its sheets, I certainly am impressed (or disappointed) by its chosen bath and body product range in the bathroom. Show me oversized bottles of unguents with names that demonstrate that the management pay attention to this level of detail – whether they’re location-specific products or locally sourced from individual makers or just quirky new brands that I’ve never heard of – and my stay will get off to a great start and I’ll overlook other minor misdemeanours. If I see the same tired old names with their stingy sized packaging (although I’ll forgive Hermès, always), I’ll subliminally be harsher in my judgement of everything else. The same goes for their reading matter, by the way…

The answer to the conundrum of what products to bless your bathrooms with is, naturally, to create your own. Step forward Chloë Luxton, wife of Charlie Luxton, who along with Dan Brod, runs a couple of properly good pubs, The Beckford Arms in Wiltshire (see page 61) and the 15thcentury Talbot Inn in Mells, Somerset (see page 70). Yes, pubs with their own home-created bathroom products. Who knew?

It was a natural step for Chloë, who met Charlie when he was Soho House’s Nick Jones’ right hand man. Chloë also worked for Jones for four years, as a product developer for the Cowshed brand (so named after Babington House’s old cowshed in the grounds).

Chloë and Charlie decided to break out on their own in 2009, when he bought The Beckford Arms (with Jones’ full blessing – he is an investor). Their vision for Beckford was for it to be ‘an English country pub – and to bring back the “pubbyness”’. ‘We wanted to create a comfortable space, with great food that’s also a great place to hang out,’ says Chloë.

Chloë’s story then becomes the typically impressive build a brand from your kitchen table-type fable. With the first of three children at her apron strings (she now has Otto, 7, Monty, 5 and Inca, 3), Chloë wanted to create a range of entirely natural bath products of her own for the pub that was inspired by the British countryside. So Bramley (named after the West London road they lived on) was born. For the pretty packaging, she drew on her love of the book Lark Rise to Candleford ‘which had beautiful images of pressed flowers’. She was determined also to make each of her six launch products to be standalone, ‘so it wasn’t a case of running the ingredients across the whole range as some work better than others, depending on the need’. What the products do share is that they are based on the therapeutic effects of the ingredients and each one has a citrus base underpinning it, giving them a wonderfully fresh and invigorating spirit.

It takes around 18 months to develop a product from start to finish and around £2,000 per product in investment, so Chloë’s biggest lesson has been to ‘go slowly’. ‘Cashflow is the biggest hurdle,’ she explains and there was a moment when she thought they’d go under. They’d somehow managed to overorder bottles by thousands but they got through it with grit, charm and determination – like most small business owners. To this day though, unlike most small business owners, she’s never had to borrow money.

Now you can not only see Bramley products in the pubs, you might be running a bubble bath in any of Robin Hutson’s Pigs (see pages 52, 67 and 82); anointing yourself with her body oil in one of the five Artist Residences (see pages 42, 88 and 89); or washing your hands with her handwash in Gails bakeries. Her million-dollar phone call though would be from Liberty. She’d love to have the iconic London store as a stockist.

A similar story can be found slightly further north, in and around the Cotswolds. Hoteliers Sam and Georgie Pearman, having sold their shares in the Lucky Onion group last year (see pages 125 and 129), have launched Country Creatures with their first property – the New Inn at Coln St Aldwyns. No doubt their bath and body brand, 100 Acres, will be gracing the bathrooms of the 15 bedrooms which have yet to be updated in Georgie’s deeply comforting style. The bespoke range of 15 products are made using botanicals and plant-based ingredients. ‘100 Acres was named as it’s synonymous with the English countryside. I wanted a range based around orchards, herbs, the old physic gardens,’ says Georgie. ‘My eventual dream would be to grow all the essential oils myself too.’ Georgie’s level of involvement even went as far as painting the now recognisable green label of the products herself, which you can also find stocked in Liberty, in the rooms of Ellenborough Park and in the glamping areas of festivals like Wilderness and the Big Feastival.

It was Cliveden’s women and the history of the astonishing Italianate, Charles Barrydesigned mansion, now a hotel that is part of Ian and Richard Livingstone’s Iconic Luxury Hotel portfolio (see pages 77, 90, 102 and 124), that inspired Ian’s wife, Natalie, to create Cliveden’s new bath and body range, for which she chose every tiny details from the ingredients to the packaging.

In 2015, Natalie wrote The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home, through which she got to know and love the women of the house, who were key to its story and key to Natalie’s new product line. ‘After the book, I thought it would be really nice to roll out that history into the spa,’ explains Natalie. ‘I used all the women’s favourite flowers and named the products after them.’ So for Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury (for whom Cliveden was originally built in the 1660s by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with whom she was having an affair), she used sensuous roses, while for American divorcee Nancy Astor, the first woman MP and the house’s last formidable chatelaine (before Natalie herself, of course), the product line is much more crisp and fresh. The spa even has its own nail colour range, with names such as Harriet (named after the Duchess of Sutherland), Scandal (after the Profumo affair) and Elizabeth Rose (after Natalie’s third daughter, aged two). With Cliveden’s latest high-profile guest being the new Duchess of Sussex on the night before her wedding to Prince Harry perhaps we’ll see a Markle colour before we know it.

Although just used in the spa currently, the products will be making their way into the house’s 43 sumptuous rooms and suites before the year is out and a men’s range, Waldorf, is due next year – as, hopefully, says Natalie, are hotel specific ranges for Chewton Glen and the Lygon Arms (two of the other hotels in the portfolio).

So, you see that having the right bath and body products can also help spin the story of your hotel – and that, in this crazy, modern world – is what people crave more than ever. A good old (sweet-smelling) yarn.

bramleyproducts.co.uk; 100acres.co.uk; clivedenhouse.co.uk