The Escapist Cotswolds Hotel With Creativity at Its Core

Opened by Matthew Freud earlier this year, The Bull at Burford is a luxurious Cotswold hotel that is distinctly anti-solitude; it’s the kind of place where you are encouraged to integrate, not isolate, to break bread with other guests over dinner and share in new experiences. Along with the communal dining experiences, where guests are encouraged to sit together and talk to one another (shock horror!), there’s also a holistic program offering activities like yoga, meditation, photography workshops, chess, flower picking, book club and more.

A community-driven hotel concept may deter some potential guests, but it’s hard not to be seduced by the experience once you’re actually there; when I visited with my sister, we befriended a lovely family, and found ourselves playing a booze-fuelled poker game with an A-list actor in the hotel’s whisky cellar late on a Saturday night. This is perhaps unsurprising considering Freud’s star power; the PR mogul is so ubiquitous that the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis namechecked him as a star in the “new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism” in his BBC series The Century of the Self.

Freud has a property of his own across the road – the Burford Priory estate – and spent five years renovating The Bull, a former coaching inn first opened in 1536. Being a guest at the hotel is akin to staying at a friend’s countryside home, albeit a very wealthy and cultured friend – the hotel’s labyrinthine, rabbit-warren corridors are lined with pieces from Freud’s own art collection, with works by Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, Salvador Dalí and Harland Miller mixed in with 17th-century wood carvings inlaid in the plasterwork. The hotel’s 18 rooms, meanwhile, are a luxurious, cosy mix of rustic and modern, with high ceilings, womb-like dusty red walls, exposed beams, bouclé armchairs, and supremely comfortable, enormous beds. In the place of televisions, there are chess sets and books, a decision designed to encourage guests to disconnect from their devices and drink in their surroundings. The jewel in the hotel’s crown is the 24-hour snack pantry – we nicknamed it the “snackctuary” – a nook in the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors offering shelves lined with sweet treats and a fridge tantalisingly full of cured meats, duck liver pate, olives, cheese and Turkish baklava.

Although genius, the snack pantry is a gluttonous addition to the hotel’s four restaurant options – Freud ensures that no one will ever go hungry at The Bull. There’s Horn, an intimate, family-style three-course dining room (we had a salad, fish pie and a deliciously creamy lemon posset for pudding), Hiro, a swanky ten-seater Japanese Omakase restaurant headed up by former Nobu head chef Hiromi, serving up Wagyu beef burgers, scallops from Scotland, hand-rolled sushi and crispy rice, and a ‘wild kitchen’ in the garden, where Freud loaded up an open-air grill table from Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman with seafood, meat and vegetables (this is how I imagine glamping dinners to be at Glastonbury). Lunch is available to order all day, and includes smashed burgers and salads; all of the food at The Bull is clean and comforting, unfussy (excluding Hiro) yet delicious.

The town outside the hotel’s walls is picturesque, with quintessentially English pubs, antique shops, tea rooms and sweet shops lining the sloping high street, along with quaint, ivy-clad thatched cottages. But with its bar and plethora of top-notch restaurants, Freud makes it difficult to want to venture outside The Bull. And with the communal vibe and extracurricular activities on offer, the focus of the hotel is not just on material comfort – it’s as much about luxury as it is about looking inwards and forging unlikely, rewarding connections with others. 

Find out more about The Bull here.