Eat, stay, love: meet Wiltshire’s new restaurant with rooms

Corsham must have one of the prettiest high streets in the UK, with bunting zigzagging its way between the mash-up of Elizabethan, Stuart and Georgian architecture in both Bath and Cotswolds stone. And that’s before you mention the birds. In London there are pigeons. In Corsham there are peacocks – roosting on rooftops, wandering the pavement and in force to check out the town’s hottest new opening: Corsham House.

This is the Beckford Group’s first restaurant with rooms, an all-day space in the Wiltshire market town’s former bank. And it is a coup for Corsham, which, despite its good looks (and its location just 20 minutes outside Bath) has been crying out for a destination address – somewhere with enough pull to quietly change how the town is used. “We’re trying to create something that feels new. It’s our idea of what an English brasserie could look like,” says co-owner Dan Brod. “In London there are loads of these all-day spots, but in the country that doesn’t really exist yet.”

The Beckford Group has serious local form. The Beckford Arms, outside Tisbury, helped redefine the modern pub-with-rooms concept when it opened in 2009. The Beckford Bottle Shop in Bath championed thoughtful small plates long before everyone else did. And earlier this summer came Teffont House, the group’s first hotel – its take on a French auberge. If that is the Beckford Arms grown up, Corsham House feels like the Beckford Bottle Shop with bedrooms. “We’re trying to make something very local, but super elevated, with incredible ingredients and just really tasty dishes,” says Brod. 

Step through the front door and straight into the bottle shop, which is modelled on the Bath store with the same tin-clad ceiling, simple wooden shelves, and brown-paper luggage tags draped around wine bottles. There are around 200 bottles here and 40 of them are offered by the glass on the restaurant menu. “Wine places are always intimidating, but we’re so happy for people here to wander the shelves, read the back of the bottles and have a chat,” says Brod.

Inside the restaurant, burgundy-red banquettes and dark wooden tables set the scene. At breakfast, the best local pastries are shipped in from Landrace bakery in Bath – its sticky coils of cardamom and cinnamon served alongside homemade granola and Dorset yoghurt with cherry compote. There’s also traditional smoked kippers from the Isle of Man served with parsley butter. Everything on the menu has been created by chef James Harris who has come straight from the kitchen at the Beckford Bottle Shop where he maintained its Michelin Bib Gourmand for the last six years.

Here, he’s as excited about the kitchen itself – “This one has a window!” – as he is about crafting dishes with as little waste as possible. This shows up on the menu in the form of cod’s roe and pickled cucumber with crackers made from bread waste. And a crispy pig’s-head fritter with gooseberry ketchup. “We freeze leftover lemons from the bar and when we’ve got enough of them, we’ll roast them with loads of dark brown sugar and cook them into vinegar,” says James. The burnt lemon vinegar is then used for dressings. Ingredients make the most of the traditional market-town setting, too, with meat from Toby Hayes, the butcher, directly opposite, potatoes from a farmer four minutes away and, sometimes, meadowsweet which Harris pulls from the hedgerow on his way to work.

Upstairs, the rooms have been designed by co-founder Charlie Luxton who used to be operations director at Soho House, and interior designer Natasha Hidvegi. “He’s a shopaholic,” says Brod of the vintage dressers and woven leather chairs Luxton is stockpiling into a warehouse. “He quite literally is always buying stuff and then we find somewhere to use it later.” The mostly mini bedrooms are painted in putty pinks and blues with Sanderson’s Truffle wallpaper lining the halls. The most charming is also the biggest – the former bank manager’s office – with a huge bay window overlooking the High Street. Other nods to the building’s former life include the vault door en route to the restaurant loos and the night safe still intact by the front door. Renovating the listed building may have been “an absolute nightmare, actually,” but a continued focus on making their addresses as sustainable as possible means that Corsham House’s electricity is provided by a large solar panel array, complete with battery storage – part of the plan to make the whole place genuinely carbon neutral.

This may be a part of Wiltshire that rubs shoulders with the Cotswolds, but the level of restaurant cooking and service still feels new for this neck of the woods. Yet Corsham House already feels rooted in its market-town setting – the sort of place that becomes woven into local life. And, crucially, it has landed softly enough that it doesn’t seem to have ruffled any peacock feathers.

Corsham House, 13 High Street, Corsham SN13 0ET. Bedrooms from £150 a night (corshamhouse.com)