If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. On the Beaulieu Road, which cuts a swath through the New Forest, poking out between oak, beech and ash, is the sign for The Pig – a bronze porker in shiny relief against Tiffany blue. You cannot miss it (unless you have your head in a paper bag).
The Pig is owned by Lime Wood Group: former Starwood marketing supremo David Elton is a director, and Robin Hutson, former Soho House board member and co-creator of Hotel du Vin, is chairman. Parent hotel Lime Wood, a few miles away, has attracted a string of "slebs" since opening in 2009.
The signage hints at luxury, yet the name has earthiness, and suggests gluttony. You could be forgiven for expecting a pub with rooms, but you'd be wide of the mark. At the top of a long drive, a pale country house is garlanded in wisteria. Stone dogs guard a blue door, tantalisingly ajar to reveal an arrangement of old watering cans and soft fronds of greenery atop polished wood, in a hallway of oak which unfurls towards reception.
The Pig has arrived to redefine the mid-priced country hotel, the sort normal people can afford. Mmm … they've got the smell right (woodsmoke mixed with old books and a hint of leather-patched sports jacket). There is more. A courtyard with wood-fired oven (for flatbreads) leads to The Pig's other raison d'etre – the walled kitchen garden, bursting with produce. There is a resident kitchen gardener (formerly of Babington House) and a forager. Low- or no-food miles are crucial to head chef James Golding's soon-to-be signature dishes: wood pigeon salad, cured beef and beets, vegetable tempura, Lyme Bay scallops with peas, beans and smoked pork loin, and garden mint mousse with chocolate ice-cream. The jasmine-scented restaurant is a posh potting shed populated by terracotta and stacks of wooden seed trays.
Bedrooms – there will be 26 when the final 10 (in a former stable block) are ready – come in three varieties, Snug, Comfy and Spacious. If you want a walk-in shower, a roll-top bath and a good view, you will need to book the top end. Beds are luxurious, and the grey and matt marble bathrooms perfectly judged.
At breakfast there's homemade granola bars, banana bread, fruit compote, bread still in the tin, and eggs from the lovely girls in the chicken run outside. All the hallmarks, in fact, of a top-flight B&B, and that's really the point. If The Pig becomes a small chain, it has the potential to turn the tables on the smart B&B, which has been quietly buffing, boutique-ing and colonising the gap, as luxury country house hotel rates go stratospheric and two- and three-stars fail to reinvent.
A night for two starts at £155 (if you include the £15pp for a cooked breakfast). This buys you a smallish bedroom and bathroom, but also service from keen young staff, freedom to flit from one relaxed, rough-luxe public space to another, and to glide seamlessly from exceptionally fresh food at dinner to bed. I dislike the two-night weekend minimum, but if they can avoid whacking these prices up in six months' time, it's a ground-breaking concept. Forget the dowdy old provincial hotel, not even the poshest B&B in the land can compete with this.
