The Brand Midwife

Getting that Zeitgeist feeling

Excuse the Guardian the terrible punning on 'noughties' and 'tenties' but it is nice to have got a name check for Feather Down Farms in a round-up of the decade recently.

With a bit of luck and a following wind, our next glamping venture Country House Hideout can also ride the tiger of another Zeitgeist prediction of the Guardian. That poshness and country houses will be in for 2010.

Fame in the (ex) colonies

Country House Hideout has been picked up by the press in Hong Kong and Australia. In recent weeks there have been full page articles in the South China Morning Post and the Sydney Morning Herald. Which is kind of ironic given the vaguely colonialist overtones of the product...

The Guardian seemed to like it

The first big write-up of Country House Hideout was in the Guardian this weekend.

Becky Gardiner and her family had stayed at Hamptworth over the opening weekend and had a good time. The children ran wild in the New Forest with Country House Hideout which "could be the very place where Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan got all domestic with Jane".

And I know I am biased but I do agree with Becky that "the shower was the best I have ever had".

Country House Hideout opens at Hamptworth

Two weeks ago we put a Country House Hideout tent up in the Malverns for Channel 4 then promptly took it down again 48 hours later. Henk and his opening crew then set off for the Hamptworth Estate to put four more up in the New Forest.

 

Guy Anderson and his team had already been hard at work levelling and preparing the sites. By the time I arrived on Wednesday it was clear that the time we had set ourselves, six weeks, was extremely ambitious. 48 hours to go before the arrival of the first journalists and the tents were up but it looked like the Battle of the Somme had been taking place around them.

Thanks to Herculean efforts by all concerned, the tents looked idyllic by Friday afternoon and we could afford ourselves a sit down and a coffee.

We knew that things like the 78 player would be a hit but it turned out that the field telephones scavenged across army surplus stores in central Europe proved even more fascinating. Mobiles were cast aside and long forgotten cries of "Daddy, but how does that work?" echoed through the forest.

The biggest laugh of the weekend was when yours truly announced to the Andersons, whose seat Hamptworth had been for generations, that I would show them how the tractor worked that would re-charge the batteries. That the ultimate townie who had first got onto a tractor 24 hours earlier could show these gentle country folk how to operate one is the equivalent of them showing me how an Oyster card worked. Peals of laughter all round.

My personal favourite was the shower. Being the exhibitionist, I rolled the sides of the bathing tent up and communed with the trees and the warm water. Having got a fire going to heat the water tank and hand pumped to the bucket that served as a shower head, you felt you had really earned it. Far better than any shower at home.

I was really sorry to leave the encampment on Sunday evening. The tents are so classy and such fun that I could quite easily have moved in and be done with the suburbs.

The first Country House Hideout tent goes up in the UK

I was in the Malverns the last week. We were putting up the first Country House Hideout tent for a Channel Four reality TV show that airs in the New Year.

The gang arrived from Holland with an articulated lorry that contained the tent and all its contents. 

The chaps worked their socks off to get the tent ready in time for filming to start late on Sunday. It looked stunning in the woodland setting. 

Everything worked fine and then it was handed over to a family who were staying overnight and being filmed. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive both on and off camera.

T

Then barely 48 hours after it had gone up, this Country House Hideout came down to be reassembled at the Hamptworth estate in the New Forest later on this week. That opens on 18th September to a mixture of press and members of the public until the end of October half term.