Symondsbury Manor Retreat

I mentioned in this post that Michiko and I were at a residential Japanese Embroidery course in March 2015. This is the course that I have been attending annually since 2005 but this time we did things slightly differently. Instead of staying in a hotel we rented a manor house – Symondsbury Manor House in Dorset.

The house was originally a medieval farmhouse and only became the ‘Manor’ house in the 20th Century. It was heavily remodelled in the late 19th century and I suspect that the area we used as a class room was an even later addition.

Part of the historic house containing the banquet hall (ground floor), bedrooms and bathrooms, and (on the left) the extension we used as a class room.

The bedrooms and bathrooms are located in part of the historic house that retains many period features. The décor is a quirky, eclectic mix of traditional pieces, contemporary furniture and artworks collected or painted by the owner. Every room has its own, distinct personality.

The living room, before we rearranged the furniture to turn it into a class room.

We originally intended to use the wood panelled banquet hall as our classroom but it was west facing and not adequately lit for our purposes. Instead we re-arranged the furniture in a large space that is usually used as a lounge/TV area. There were plenty of windows in this more recent extension and much better lighting.

The banquet hall

The biggest difference was that we self-catered on this occasion. We had a small team of 'caterers' assigned for each day who provided morning coffee (with cake), a buffet lunch, afternoon tea (with cake), and the evening meal. The day’s team prepared all of the food and did the clearing up (except breakfast which was self-service) while everyone else spent the day stitching. There were enough of us that we were only designated to do one day each. We had some splendid meals and did I mention that we had cake? Several people brought cakes with them and we had three birthday cakes! We had so much cake that there was some left over at the end of the week despite our best efforts to eat it all!

Birthday cake ...

... and more birthday cake.

We did get to use the banquet hall later in the week when we actually held a 'banquet' to celebrate some special birthdays.

The banquet hall used as it was intended!

It was a departure from our normal arrangement but I think it worked extremely well and I hope that we will do something similar in the future.

Happy Stitching