The restoration and conversion of the Grade-II listed Aller Park School on the Dartington Hall Estate into a 22-bedroom hotel, with enhanced landscaping to include a subterranean bath house and spa, is one of New British Design most significant commissions to date. Aller Park is an early product of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst’s experimental approach to education, the arts and agriculture at Dartington following their acquisition of the declining Estate in 1925. It was one of the multiple buildings constructed on the estate which later formed the wider school and arts college. The present custodians remain rooted in this lineage and seek to develop a meaningful and sustainable use for a somewhat forgotten building which has lain empty since the school’s closure in 1987.

The vision for a future hotel at Aller Park is one of symbiosis with the Trust’s wider aims. The building will once again provide for and champion the values of the Estate, as much as it shall be supported by, and integral to the greater whole. The project also calls for a fresh injection of the original optimism and ambition that characterised the early days of the Dartington Experiment.

This Pre-Application design phase has been prepared over the course of 9 months, commencing in Summer 2022. This document embodies the strategic thinking and ideas that have been developed by the design team to date and is to be read in conjunction with their specific areas of additional consultancy covering heritage, planning, structural engineering, fire engineering and ecology. It is the client’s ambition for the project is to be commenced for the centenary anniversary of the Elmhirst’s arrival at Dartington Hall in 2025, with the hotel operational prior to the centenary of Aller Park’s completion in 2031.