Homewood is a Georgian country house on the side of the Limpley Stoke valley, about 15 minutes from the centre of Bath and feeling a great deal further out than that. It sits in 20 acres with the Avon valley laid out below, and the house has been done up with real character rather than the usual country-hotel beige — there is art everywhere, some of it cheerfully odd, and the whole place has the air of somewhere run by people enjoying themselves.
There are 32 bedrooms between the main house and the Mallingford Mews suites, several of the latter with hot tubs and balconies looking out over the fields. The spa takes its cue from Roman bathing and is properly good: hydrotherapy indoors, a vitality pool and a heated swimming pool outside, sauna and steam room. Olio, the restaurant, leans Mediterranean and draws a great deal of its produce from a no-dig kitchen garden on site, which means the menu genuinely moves with the season rather than merely claiming to.
For weddings it works at more than one scale. Small and intimate is the house’s natural register — Tibby’s House and the Pavilion are for the very smallest gatherings, and the light-filled Chandelier Room takes up to 36 — and then exclusive use hands you the entire property, every bedroom included, for up to 110 guests. Dogs are welcome, which matters to rather more couples than venues tend to assume.
Where the band plays
This is a country house hotel rather than a barn, and the rooms behave accordingly: contained, carpeted, with soft furnishings quietly absorbing a good deal of what you put into them. A four- or five-piece is usually the sweet spot. A large band with a horn section will spend the night fighting the room rather than filling it, and will end up being asked to turn down, which suits nobody. There is a dancefloor and a house sound system, and for the daytime — drinks on the lawn with the valley falling away below, or the meal itself — something acoustic is exactly right.
When the music has to stop
Worth asking about early on: the live music curfew here can fall before the venue’s own finish time. Some evenings run to midnight, while on other dates the band is expected to be done by 11pm. Freshford sits in a narrow, wooded valley where sound travels further than the map suggests, so an earlier cut-off for amplified music is no great surprise, and a limiter is a fair thing to ask about in the same conversation. An 11pm finish is perfectly workable — it simply means the band is on stage by about half past eight, which in turn means dinner and speeches need to run to time. Knowing the number early is what makes that easy rather than fraught.
Bands available in Somerset and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Somerset.
- Somerset Wedding Bands
- Events Bands in Somerset
- Tribute Acts in Somerset
- Somerset Wedding DJs
- Corporate Entertainment in Somerset
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.