The Connaught is a place where the original lifts still creak elegantly, rain patters on the roof and solid walls make it feel like, whatever troubles befall the world, all will be well within. Some places just have magic in their bones: the whiff of a vast Cire Trudon candle in the lobby the gleam of 200-year-old oak bannisters or the hum from a perfectly low-lit bar, where a Martini trolley is being wheeled from table to table. Like the place itself, life here feels entirely unforced.

But I’m just as happy in my light-bathed room, clad in a chenille robe and quietly perusing the pocket library. A new spa, The Bothy, opens in 2022 with a focus on nature and mindfulness. Activities include trail running, wild swimming and rowing on the lake with tuck boxes in tow. There’s a constant sense of the outside creeping in – sometimes literally, in the case of the biodynamic farm on the estate that supplies two wonderful restaurants overseen by seasonal-eating pioneer Skye Gyngell. Designer Ben Thompson went big on earthy tones and textures, ‘editing’ the grand house (his words) with greenery and leaving forest-green, ochre or rose-coloured walls elegantly unadorned.

For all that the restoration itself was a trial – Boston-based billionaire Gerald Chan endured more than a decade of painstaking works before its eventual opening in 2018 – the end result is proof that Georgian needn’t feel stiff or chintzy. The first time I came, I was eight months pregnant and anxious, but we’d barely finished The Archers omnibus when we glided into Heckfield’s 438 acres of pasture and woodland, with its arboretum and ornamental lake, installed in the 19th century by Viscount Eversley, speaker of the House of Commons. Even getting here is relatively frictionless from London. There’s a reassuring seamlessness to Heckfield Place, a renovation of a stout Georgian manor house that is true to its red-brick bones, yet somehow perfectly modern.

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