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So British,

not so stuffy The country manor hotel goes informal at Pig Group properties

The Pig in the Cotswolds is the latest hotel to open in the Pig Group, so named to suggest a more casual experience than the usual country “manor” or “house.” PHOTOS BY JEREMIE SOUTEYRAT — THE NEW YORK TIMES

Galoshes, or “Wellies,” for guests are a feature of all the Pig Group’s hotels.

Staff members at The Pig in the Cotswolds tend the vegetable garden, whose produce goes into the house victuals. The hotel chain says most other ingredients come from local sources.

Belton leek risotto, left, is made with Royal Bassett blue cheese from nearby Wiltshire. A shortbread pig tops apricot fool, a dessert made with local Evesham apricots.

The hotel chain’s nearby Village Pub dates to the 17th century and offers six bedrooms.

A guest room in the eaves at The Pig in the Cotswolds in Barnsley, Great Britain.

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By Lucie Young

The New York Times

When British hotelier Robin Hutson, 67, took a paintbrush to a vintage painting in one of his Pig hotels and replaced the man’s red riding jacket with a less-showy brown one, he transformed the huntsman from a posh gentleman into a rural farmer in one swoop.

“We call it Pigification,” said Judy Hutson, 71, Robin Hutson’s wife and the creative director of the Pig Group, a collection of country house hotels known for their easygoing charm.

Two new Pigs are opening in quick succession this year in the 790-square-mile Cotswolds National Landscape, the largest protected area in Britain, making a total of nine hotels and the first pub in the group, all dotted around the south of England.

Each Pig is carefully chosen for its location. The two new venues — the Pig in the Cotswolds, which just opened, and the Village Pub, which opened in June — are just a few paces apart in the picture-postcard village of Barnsley. Within a 30-minute drive are William Morris’ Kelmscott Manor, Diddly Squat Farm (owned by Jeremy Clarkson, a British television personality) and the Roman town of Cirencester.

The Hutsons chose the Pig name to suggest a more casual experience than the usual fancy country house sobriquets like “manor” or “house.”

“When the first Pig opened in 2011, I wanted to deformalize the country house hotel,” Robin Hutson said.

“People were afraid to go up the driveway,” Judy Hutson said, referring to the typical fancy country house hotel. “They were scared it was going to be expensive. It was all white glove service and people in suits.”

The Pig hotels avoid all the usual country house folderol: no Michelin-star restaurants, croquet lawn, poolside Champagne or golf courses. Instead, guests get to play house in beautiful 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century buildings and eat affordable, tasty food from ingredients mostly grown on the property or from within a 25-mile radius.

At the Cotswolds Pigs, I ate lamb from a nearby farm and ice cream with nectarines and raspberries from the hotel’s garden, and drank Pinot Précoce from award-winning Cotswolds winemaker Woodchester Valley.

The Pig in the Cotswolds is on the National Heritage List for England. A three-story 1697 house built for the local squire, it later became the home of Rosemary Verey, one of Britain’s foremost garden designers. She helped King Charles III with the gardens at nearby Highgrove and created gardens for Elton John.

Verey died in 2001, but her 4-acre, romantic vision (picture a walkway draped with clusters of yellow laburnum, blousy roses, knotty hedges and little architectural follies) lives on, preserved by the head gardener for the hotel’s ornamental gardens, Jen Danbury.

A pub dating to the early 1700s was part of the package when the hotel group bought Verey’s house. The Hutsons describe its new look as “Dickensian”: low beams, darkly lit nooks, roaring fires and six bedrooms with sumptuously provisioned beds scowled over by oil paintings of crabby-looking characters.

For her Pig interiors, Judy Hutson manipulates a huge orchestra of paint colors, wallpapers and fabrics. Many of her design elements are playful and unexpected: huge pink baths in two of the grandest rooms at the Pig in the Cotswolds; curtains like string vests that hang in the spa, “to give some privacy but not block the views,” and Moon Garden Midnight wallpaper by House of Hackney in the public toilets, which depicts flowers with eyes and moon creatures dancing in the foliage.

Hutson’s design career started in 1994, when her husband asked her to do the interior for his new Hotel du Vin brand (townhouse hotels in the provinces noted for their excellent wine lists and food). Her background was as an occupational therapist for psychiatric patients at a London hospital. Fortunately, that experience did teach her about the psychology of space and color and how each affected the patients; what calmed them and made them smile.

Guests often get so comfortable at the Pigs, they throw their dirty hiking jackets over the chairs and put their feet up in the lounges. Sometimes to the irritation of their hosts. “I’ll think, ‘You don’t know how much that fabric cost,’ ” Judy Hutson said.

Often the most popular stays at the hotels are the eccentric outbuildings. At the Pig in the Cotswolds, there is a room in a potting shed, seven in the stable yard building and an entire cottage that sleeps eight. If demand is high, the Hutsons will add Shepherd’s Huts (wagons on wheels big enough to hold king beds and en-suite baths) to the 8 acres of farmland, which includes a large vegetable garden, an apple orchard, berry bushes, beehives and chickens. (Rooms at the Village Pub and the Pig in the Cotswolds range from 215 pounds to 1,015 pounds for the cottage, or from about $280 to about $1,335; some rates include breakfast.)

The Hutsons are planning to retire at the end of the year, leaving Tom Ross, 49, the company’s CEO, in charge. They are planning to open two more Pig hotels in the next two years: one in a 16th-century manor on 53 acres in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the other in a Jacobean house with a 13th-century moat near Tunbridge Wells.

As to the future, “I’ve already told Tom if he needs someone to come with him to look at new buildings, I’m around,” Robin Hutson said.