Spot Home Farm: What Occurs When a Textile Designer Creates a Campsite
We expect British textile designer Gemma Shepherd has invented the right tenting accent: a three-in-one merino wool wrap/throw/blanket. Not solely that, she opened what, for us, might be the right campsite wherein to put on it: Spot Home Farm.
“Usually for me tenting is simply hell on earth,” she admits. “The considered only a skinny sheet of material between you and a whole stranger… I simply discover that so grim!” With that in thoughts, final summer time, she arrange simply two bell tents in a secluded meadow on her household farm within the Low Weald of Kent: a wild, low-impact, quietly luxurious web site for teams of associates that opens in Might and disappears virtually with out a hint in September.
Let’s have a look round.
The tents are positioned in a meadow that varieties a part of Gemma’s 50-acre household farm. The meadow is surrounded by Orlestone Forest Nature Reserve, a protected and historical woodland that’s dwelling to nightingales, deer, and uncommon species of moths and butterflies. “The meadow itself is that this magical enclave,” explains Gemma. “There may be an outdated hunt leap in a single nook of the sector. Climb over that and also you’re straight out into the forest. For those who stroll far sufficient, you’ll emerge on the pub within the village of Warehorne, which is ideal.” (In our guide, all good campsites require a stroll to a village pub and a straightforward meal.)
Rising up, Gemma camped in the identical meadow, and it was throughout lockdown that she rediscovered its magic. “I actually felt for anybody residing in a metropolis at the moment,” she says. “I all of a sudden appreciated simply how fortunate we had been to have this house, and I needed different folks to expertise it as a result of it’s simply so beautiful, so peaceable.”
Gemma has arrange two bell tents—one massive and one little—and furnished them with “correct beds” (one other prerequisite for pleased tenting). Within the bigger tent there’s a tremendous king, two single beds, and house for a 3rd beneficiant camp mattress. There’s even an “old-school washstand” on the foot of the mattress so that you gained’t end up brushing your tooth in a bush on the finish of the evening. There’s additionally a log burner and armchairs in every (tick: that is the UK).
