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A family-owned hotel in Swaffham offering home-cooked food in the beautiful setting of a Grade II listed building has won award after award for its environmental initiatives. How do they do that? Corinne Hitching reports.
They’ve been featured on Wish You Were Here, they’ve been to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen and they’ve beaten hotels ten times their size to awards, but Les and Vanessa Scott don’t let it go to their heads. ‘Our primary commitment is to our customers’ Vanessa says, ‘but we won’t do that at the expense of our employees, suppliers, neighbours and the environment’.
Strattons hotel is a superb example of elegance, beautifully restored and furnished in keeping with its origins, with seven individually styled bedrooms. All the food is home cooked with much of the ingredients grown on the premises, including raising their own chickens which ensures the freshest eggs are served for breakfast.
The hotel is also home to Les and Vanessa, their two children, three cats, two dogs and two rabbits and therefore exudes that personal touch. Being named Which Country Hotel of the Year and winning the Sunday Times Golden Pillow award may be considerable achievements, but what makes Strattons stand apart from the rest is their environmental activities.
Their mission statement is to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink, rationalise, rework and recover’ a sentiment they take to heart to such an extent that the hotel only produces half a wheelie bin full of waste each week. Quite some achievement and something that has won them many environmental awards including Green Globe small hotel of the year, British Airways UK Tourism for Tomorrow, EDP Business Award for the environment and the Queen’s Award for outstanding environmental achievement.
Policies that have helped them reap this clutch of accolades are many and include the recycling of all guest newspapers into EDP bricks which are then used in the open fireplace in the lounge; the separation of organic waste which is composted and used in the cultivation of their vegetables, fruit and flowers; and the separation of all glass, wine corks, candle stumps, cardboard, broken china, plastic bottles, string, envelopes, paper, plastic bags and foil to be reused, recycled or returned to the supplier for reuse.
Paper, which has been used on one side, is cut up and made into order pads then shredded and added to the compost heap. Broken china is collected for mural and mosaic artwork in the house and even shells are washed and used to enhance pots in the garden. Refillable liquid soap dispensers are provided in the bathrooms, together with refillable dispensers of an all-in-one shampoo/foam bath/shower gel which is manufactured by ‘Faith in Nature’, a company with environmental ethics.
Indeed, it is hard to find anything in the hotel that doesn’t have at least two lives. But their environmental practices don’t stop within the confines of the house. ‘We believe that we have an obligation to help Swaffham and its people,’ Vanessa says, ‘so we encourage our guests to support the local community rather than going further afield’.
This strategy is made easier by allowing local businesses to display their wares in the hotel and its grounds, which means that the majority of the guests go home with armfuls of local produce.
All this environmental activity also has a wonderful by-product – it reduces operating costs, something that all hotels are naturally keen on doing. By taking simple measures such as changing the light bulbs to energy efficient ones, turning off any electrical equipment that is not needed, rather than leaving them on stand-by, and insulating all curtains with wool linings, has meant that the Strattons electricity bill has been steadily reducing over the past five years.
Other actions taken include installing individual thermostats on all radiators, ensuring cool air circulates the fridge during cooking sessions to save it from having to work harder, turning off all lights that are not necessary and running the washing machine after 7pm when it is more economical.
Water usage also comes in for inspection with excess drinking water from the restaurant collected and used to water the garden. Rainwater is collected in an underground tank and manually pumped to a new Victorian master bedroom and bathroom for bathing, with a reclaimed Victorian grate channelling any excess water into a store for use on the garden.
Strattons operate a ‘smoke-free’ zone throughout the entire hotel, a fact that won them the ‘Great Atmosphere Award’ by the North West Anglia health authority in 1999, and strives to be a good neighbour by reminding guests of their proximity to local residents. Even the cockerel does his bit for the community by being kept locked up at night!
Swaffham is in fact not only home to Strattons, but also to the EcoTech Centre, an educational charity which aims to stimulate and inform people about the need for sustainable development. With organic gardens, a biomass power station and one of the tallest wind turbines in the world, the EcoTech Centre is another great reason to plan a stay at Strattons.
The country ideal that Les and Vanessa Scott have successfully created perfectly harmonises luxury with a care for the environment – the ultimate in creature comforts, for guest and planet alike. There can’t be many awards left to win, but as Vanessa says, ‘we simply care about the world we live in, after all, we are merely the caretakers of our planet and we take that job seriously.’
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