Longueville Manor hotel and restaurant: home-from-home luxury, with a twist

You can tell a lot about someone - their household even - from their pets. Indie, an aging, magisterial and contented ginger tomcat, speaks volumes about Longueville Manor.

He wandered, homeless, into the hotel years ago and never left. Like the hotel’s guests, Indie is indulged to the hilt. Well fed and loved, with his own cat-flap and sleeping spot in the snug, he embodies the ‘home from home’ ethos running through this elegant, thoughtful, family-run establishment.

True, few homes have a spectacular 5,000-bottle wine cellar, 70 discreetly upbeat and attentive staff, pretty outdoor swimming pool and small lake sitting in peaceful private grounds of around 17 acres, a justifiably award-winning kitchen, a private yacht for charter, mini-spa, gym and an all-pervading air of casual grandeur, but the sentiment is convincing all the same.

The secret to this success story - a peculiarity among the UK’s Relais and Chateaux’s often corporately-run hotels - could be that Longueville Manor, just outside St Helier in Jersey, is and always has been a family-run business. The tumble-down manor was bought in 1949 by the grandparents of current owners Malcolm and Patricia Lewis, after they spotted it on holiday.

Recently celebrating its 75th anniversary it has, over the years, morphed into an exquisitely-presented, cosy, happy AA Five Red Star luxury retreat to which loyal guests continue to return for decades, many from the island itself.

Old hands

How can you tell it’s happy? Try finding another hotel that has retained the same head chef for 35 years, its head housekeeper for 40, maintenance man for a similar period, its general assistant for 25 and whose manager, Italian Daniela Corasaniti, claims to be a ‘newbie’ with just 15 years under her belt. No wonder it’s been awarded a Michelin Key.

Longueville rightfully celebrates its rich past, albeit with a light touch embracing a subtle contemporary twist. The core of the imposing 29-bedroom manor house - its richly panelled dining room and adjacent lookout tower, once the tallest in Jersey - dates from the 14th century.

That much is evident from the heft of the walls, mullioned windows, stout archways and further panelling in the lounge, believed to have been retrieved from a wrecked Spanish Armada ship that washed up on the rocks.

First impressions are of a solidly imposing building, framed by a gravelled carriage drive encircling a dancing fountain, semi-formal planting and grand old trees. In through the magnificently arched entrance however - manned by a smartly-suited, smiling door-opener - and it’s easy to enter relaxation mode at Longueville. The ambience is full-on relaxed, indulgent, make-yourself-at-home country manor. Spotless too, with exemplary attention to detail ensuring that the public rooms, bedrooms, even the gardens, are painstakingly cared for.

Dead delicious

It’s not just the tranquillity - and the superb treatments on offer in the mini-spa - that will wash your worries away. There is also a commanding bar in the main drawing room, the drinks menu straining with inventive, flamboyant cocktails (try the Dead Delicious, complete with smoke bomb), coffee-table books always to hand, fireplaces kept roaring.

Throughout the beautifully restored 29-bedroom house, modern lamps, mirrors, objects, vases bursting with flowers and a calm, muted palette offer an understated contemporary feel, enhanced by young, friendly, front-of-house staff.

Next to the bar are two separate sitting areas with more books and carefully curated curios (some of them family heirlooms, no doubt watched over by the hotel ghost), the older panelled dining room and a lighter, more modern one, cosy but still traditional, with framed engravings and muted lighting.

Bedrooms, too, including a family room, radiate an English country house theme. There’s lightly patterned wallpaper, tranquil neutral colours, oversized bathtubs, spacious walk-in showers, a pleasing mix of traditional and contemporary furniture, big squashy colourful cushions, comfortable armchairs, exquisitely-arranged bowls of fruit and Gaia natural skincare products. There’s no London bustle here - the rooms are countryside-quiet. And - it’s a home from home, remember - don’t expect a booking number when you check in; it’s names only.

Home grown

It’s those restaurants, however, that are the beating heart of Longueville, thanks to the creativity of Head Chef Andrew Baird. He claims to be hands-on and it’s true; he dives for his own scallops and squid and fishes for the restaurant’s red mullet and turbot when he has time. He even helps with those cocktails and the kitchen garden, complete with bees, for their honey, such is his passion for the hotel.

The menu is a great showcase for Jersey’s - and the hotel garden’s - produce. If some of the dishes look familiar at first glance, think again. Take the free-range quail Scotch egg. It’s only when you bite in that the wizardry emerges, in the form of tarragon, glazed black fig and Pata Negra. Ditto the line-caught red mullet main. Sounds straightforward enough but there’s magic in the combination of grilled sardines, cuttlefish risotto, crisp croquette, piquillo pepper and creamy saffron sauce. Not just great taste but wonderful textures too.

Same goes for the rhubarb from the garden, for dessert. Paired with Madagascan vanilla delice, fennel, pistachio and rhubarb sorbet, it’s almost as spirited as that earlier cocktail. Longueville’s cheese trolley is of legendary proportions, with 30 different offerings (and more in the kitchen), alongside rhubarb and prune compote. It wouldn’t look out of place in a large deli.

It’s hard to believe that Andrew actually wanted to be a silversmith when growing up in Sheffield, but went on to be trained at the Ritz. It would have been a loss to the culinary world. And to his wife, who’s often the first to test-drive his newly-created dishes.

Bottle job

Some visitors come especially for the extensive wine list; it is hard to resist the artfully arranged bottles in the dining room (not just your ordinary 750ml jobs, but eye-popping Imperials, Balthazars and15-litre Nebuchadnezzars. That’s a lot of wine.

If you don’t fancy shelling out hundreds for a fancy bottle, Longueville’s WineEmotion system lets you buy just 75 or 125ml, an injection of nitrogen into the bottle ensuring that the last glass will taste as good as the first, even weeks later. So instead of blowing £350 on a bottle of Pouilly Fume XXI Louis Benjamin 2021, how about a glass for £78? And then a guided tour of the cellar the following day, perhaps with a pre-arranged tasting, although they are unlikely to open the £3,210 ‘49 Chateau d’Yquem or Boal 1864 or for that.

Afterwards, lose yourself in the gardens, where the serene formality of the planting close to the manor (and the separate cottage, also containing accommodation for groups) gives way to a sunny courtyard with hot tub, the practicality of the Victorian kitchen garden, greenhouses and a dovecote, then the lake, followed by the enchanting isolation of Swiss Valley, leading to woodland walks, long open fields and the countryside beyond where, for a few hours, you’ll forget all about London and Heathrow, a mere 40 or 50-minute hop away.

Indie would probably agree; it really is home-from-home. Just not as most of us know it. So it’s definitely a good thing that the current, third-generation owners are now in the process of grooming the up and coming fourth...

Longueville Manor Hotel and Restaurant, Jersey

Website: www.longuevillemanor.com/

Tel: +44 1534 725501

Email: info@longuevillemanor.com

Rooms from £250 B+B for a standard double, to £1,600 for the four-person cottage, B+B.

Car hire: evieondemand.com/car-hire Tel: +44 1534 510462

Costs: From £8.95 per hour or £29 for 24 hours, including insurance and charging. Users should download the app for real-time pricing and availability.

What to do in Jersey

We hired an electric car from small local provider EVie for the 20-minute trip from the airport to Longueville, then trundled around the entire perimeter coastal road at a very leisurely pace the following afternoon. Expect an endless parade of coves and beaches, lunar-like rocky outcrops stretching out to sea, lots of photo opportunities, various stop-offs for sandwiches, tea and coffee, and stunning sea views framed by cliffs, trees and farms.

Jersey is a mix of packed, intensely suburban housing, spacious modern ‘Grand Design’-style architecture, gracious period homes, big hotels, pretty, busy towns and extremely quiet, not to say extremely narrow country roads seemingly in the middle of nowhere, top maximum permitted speed, 40mph. Highlight of our own self-drive tour was stopping at La Corbiere, on the west coast, after a whizz alongside the spectacular sands of the west coast, for a dramatic sunset over the island lighthouse.