History

The earliest reference to the property is found in the Tithe Land Registry of 1609. It was known as Pennyhill field and thought to have been common land used as a beacon-warning site aiding a national system, warning the arrival of the Spanish Armada in 1588

James Hodges, a civil engineer, who had been born in Queensborough in Kent in 1814, began to build the first house on the site in 1849 and was completed in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.

James Hodges died in 1879 and the next occupant of Pennyhill was Louis Schott, a banker born in Frankfurt but with British Nationalisation. He added the Orangery in 1881 – the site of the current 45,000 sqft Spa. Louis died in 1901 and the house was then occupied until 1922 by his nephew, Louis Floershim, also born in Frankfurt and a naturalised British subject. He extended the house in 1903 in neo-Tudor style using Bath stone. For a period during the 1st World War the house reputedly served as a ‘rest house’ for officers.

From 1922 until his death in 1933 Sir Lyndsey Byron Peters KBE was living in the house after which the estate was purchased by Mr Colin Goldsworthy Heywood in 1935, owner of British Abrasives Ltd (still trading in North London today) and credit goes to him for the terracing of the formal gardens, the inspiration of which was derived from Chateau de Villandry in Tours. After he died, it was sold to Mr Peter Garbut and his son Michael when it was first opened as a hotel in 1972 and changed hands just once more until the present company, Exclusive Hotels bought it and over the years transformed it into a world class five red-star hotel.