Fairmont's newest UK opening is a serious renovation job. Fairmont Cheshire – The Mere, just outside Knutsford, has reopened after a multi-year restoration and expansion that grew the hotel from 81 rooms to 116, with 23 of them suites. The design work went to Bergman Design House, the studio founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund, and it's their largest UK hospitality project to date. Leach Rhodes Walker handled the architecture, with developer Select Group and Accor's own design team behind the project.
The estate itself has history: the land traces back to the Domesday Book, and the parkland golf course was laid out in the 1930s. The resort spans 157 acres with a lake and woodland at its heart, and Soliman says that lake drove every material choice — surfaces were chosen to echo the water, the trees and the ground around them.
That explains the unusually rich material list. Japanese lacquer, handcrafted Moroccan zellige, coloured cement tiles, beaten metals, expressive stone and figured timber veneers all appear across the hotel. The zellige and cement tiles in particular give the interiors pattern and colour with a handmade irregularity you can't fake. Public spaces borrow from mid-century hospitality — sculptural forms, layered lighting, textured finishes — while the bedrooms quieten down into soft palettes, bespoke furniture and warm lighting, which suits a part of England where the light fades early half the year.
Eating and drinking is a headline in itself. Gordon Ramsay at The Mere is the flagship restaurant, conceived as an architectural space in its own right — dramatic but intimate, per the brief. The Orangery and The Club Lounge round out the dining, and the bars are built around Fairmont's Classics Perfected cocktail programme.
The other big draw is the Fairmont Spa: 1,715 square metres with a 20-metre pool, a hydropool, an outdoor vitality pool and an open-air pool, plus sauna, steam and hammam. Rather than a bland corridor of treatment rooms, the whole space is built from rustic timber so it feels like it belongs to the woodland around it.
For travellers, this fills a real gap. Cheshire has long had genteel country-house stays, but this brings Accor's Fairmont luxury brand — a proper destination spa, a Ramsay restaurant and a championship-adjacent golf course — to the north west, within easy reach of Manchester. It works equally well as a spa weekend, a golfing base or a country escape with genuinely ambitious design, which is rare anywhere outside London.
