HOME TOUR: VILLA VENTORUM

In 1832, on a picturesque estate in Somerset, southwest England, a group of laborers came across something unexpected in the ground. In the absence of an archaeologist, they asked a local vicar, who was an amateur historian, to come and take a closer look. He was able to identify a number of Roman coins that dated to the reign of Emperor Constantius II in the 4th century, as well as what appeared to be the remains of a Roman villa—a find that would ultimately lead, after nearly two centuries of disjointed discovery, to its painstaking reconstruction. 

Located within sight of the ruins of the original villa, Villa Ventorum is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between archaeologists and hoteliers. The reimagined Roman home opened in 2022 as part of a decade-long project to transform the estate of the 18th-century Hadspen House, after it was bought in 2013 by South African couple Koos Bekker, a telecoms billionaire, and Karen Roos, the former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa. 

What began with the conversion of the estate’s Georgian manor house into a hotel and spa quickly grew to include further accommodation, a retail store and various hospitality venues, all housed within restored agricultural outbuildings. Thirty acres of landscaped gardens have been tamed and hundreds of acres of woodland and farmland sustain an ecosystem that produces cheese, cider, meat and clean energy. A membership program offers a busy calendar of cultural and educational events led by in-house experts in entomology, biodiversity and regenerative farming. Renamed the Newt in Somerset—a tribute to the many small amphibians that reside on the estate—it is now less a hospitality offering and more a visionary regional visitor attraction.

Given Bekker and Roos’ vision—and seemingly bottomless pockets—it was perhaps inevitable that the Roman site would become part of the Newt’s offering, but experts were surprised at the scale and ambition of the project. When teams of archaeologists began the process of unearthing the ruins in 2015, the dig became the largest privately funded excavation in Britain. “The world of archaeology is actually really small, and so I knew about this project from about week two,” recalls Ric Weeks, who became the Newt’s onsite archaeologist and exhibitions manager in 2021. “This kind of site is very common in Britain, but now it was being explored to a degree that hadn’t happened before, and they had 18 months to do it, which is exceptional. In that time frame, you can really delve into the chronology and understand what’s happening.”

The excavations revealed that the villa had originally been built as a modest three-room farmhouse on the site of an Iron Age settlement. Between the 3rd and the 5th centuries it had been adapted and enlarged, probably as its owners’ fortune grew, with the addition of a dining room and a more elaborate bathhouse, before it was abandoned in the early 5th century when the Romans left Britain. A brooch in the shape of a crossbow—according to Weeks, one of about seven in the world—was discovered in the final few days of the dig. It had been placed carefully in a box beneath the floor in one of the rooms, likely as an offering to the gods, and indicated that at the height of the villa’s evolution, around A.D. 350, it was home to a noble who had a magisterial rank and was a substantial landowner. “The equivalent of a multimillionaire nowadays,” Weeks says.

The brooch is now on display in a new glass-walled museum building alongside mosaics depicting Diana, the goddess of hunting, and Bacchus, the god of wine, and countless other artifacts found during the villa’s excavation. The full-scale reconstruction is a short walk away along a path through a vineyard, and appears in the rolling green landscape as if in a Benouville painting. Realized in honey-colored Hadspen stone, topped with handmade terra-cotta tiles and wrapped by medicinal herb gardens, it follows the T-shaped plan of the original villa, approximately 180 feet wide and 70 feet long, with bedroom chambers, kitchens and a working complex of Roman baths all reconstructed using the same local materials and processes that the Romans would have used. 

“After the 2016 excavations, the estate’s owners and architect wondered whether we could attempt to reconstruct what we had evidence for in the ground,” says Weeks. “Our partners at the Southwest Heritage Trust and many other experts came together to make an ambitious idea into a reality.” 

“Aspects of the villa’s design echo how we aspire to live now.”

The villa is now open to the Newt’s members for guided tours. There is always a risk of veering into theme-park territory with a project like this, but here this has been avoided thanks to the team’s forensic attention to detail. Everything from the furniture to the food and drink on offer—doughballs with ricotta and poppy seeds, and conditum paradoxum, a sweet Roman wine made with saffron, white pepper and honey, for example—has been based on archaeological evidence. To demonstrate, Weeks picks up a pleasingly rotund glass from a desk in the villa’s formal entranceway. “This looks like something you might buy in IKEA,” he says, “but it’s based on a tiny sliver of the rim of a glass that we excavated and sent to the British Museum, which then analyzed it against surviving glass in the Mediterranean. They found the exact style because it was made using a very standardized process.” To recreate the design, the team contacted a glassmaker in Murano, Venice—the only facility in the world that could make the same glass to the same quality.

The villa’s walls are made of wattle and daub and have been decorated with paintings featuring elegant borders, classical motifs, landscapes and portraits; the floors are rammed earth interspersed with intricate mosaics made by teams from Cambridge University using locally quarried stone—the same as those unearthed on the site. For the frescoes in the bathhouse’s tepidarium and caldarium, a specialist team of conservators was brought in from Italy, who used a traditional, almost extinct, method known as Buon Fresco, which involves painting directly onto wet plaster. “Decoration was used to show off status,” says Weeks. “Nobles were hugely snobbish, so they would make sure that the bathhouse—the part of the home you want to wow people with—would be where you concentrate your resources.” 

The villa’s formal entrance, an arched doorway flanked by cast-bronze oil lamps, frames a view through the house and out into the garden. The symmetry and order prefigure the architecture of grand English country houses and gardens, and in many ways, aspects of the villa’s design echo how we aspire to live now, with a focus on wellness and relaxation. There are easy connections between indoor and outdoor spaces, with its portico and landscaped garden, while the bathhouse—the equivalent of a modern spa, complete with underfloor heating—would have been used two to three times daily.¹ The room used for receiving visitors of high rank, the tablinum, is perhaps the most ostentatious. Here guests would be wined and dined as they reclined on elegant couches and admired the decorative double-height ceiling and romantic wall paintings.

Some might be cynical about an archaeological project being so closely tied to a commercial venture and question its value and authenticity. Roman-inspired pottery and reference books are available to buy in the gift shop and, when the pinot noir vines planted around Villa Ventorum (using a single-stake trailing method favored by the Romans, of course) produce their first crop, the resulting wine will no doubt be packaged and sold to visitors. But the team recognize they are treading a fine line between the cultural and commercial, and are careful to strike a balance. It is, after all, precisely this unique model, where academia meets tourism, that enables this untold history to be brought to life in such an engaging way. 

“One of the core goals at the start of this project was to explain more clearly and more openly why the Romans were here in Somerset,” Weeks says. “In archaeology, we are taught to look at stones and try to link them to something bigger. But it’s only when you actually raise a building up and make it real that it really hits you. I think that’s the difference with this project: What we are offering here is a completely immersive experience.”

“Decoration was used to show off status. Nobles were hugely snobbish.”