1 · Position
Soho House opened Babington House in Somerset in the late 1990s as a country sequel to the London club — a Georgian manor, twenty-eight rooms, meals at any hour. The only space available for a spa was the old cow shed. The name stuck, and Nick Jones created the spa there as, in the house’s own phrase, a retreat within a retreat. The perfumer Richard Howard developed products specifically for it, using ingredients from the Victorian walled garden on the estate.
2 · ⚑ The brand was an accident, and the house says so
This is the entry’s reason for existing. In Jones’s own account: It was an accident; when we did all this, we didn’t plan to sell them, anywhere. But then people would come and stay and say, “Well, can I have these at home?” Every other treatment brand in this group was designed to be a brand — Cinq Mondes at LHL-S-160 Cinq Mondes was collected over eighteen months of travel with a business in mind, Cellcosmet at LHL-S-159 Cellcosmet came out of a laboratory. Cowshed is the only one the Library holds that was created for one building and became a company because guests asked it to.
3 · What it says about amenity
A hotel amenity that guests want to buy is the clearest possible measure of the amenity, and the hardest to fake. The register has recorded the same mechanism once before at LHL-S-163 Café del Mar, where guests asked to take the atmosphere home and the bar sold them recordings of it. Two houses, two decades apart, both turned into companies by the same question from a guest.
4 · Candour
⚑ The brand’s own pages give the naming two ways — that the products were made for the spa and the spa was in a cow shed, and that the fragrances were inspired by the walled garden. Both are compatible and the entry carries both. A best-selling product is named after a pile of cow dung, which the brand states cheerfully and the Library records because a luxury spa line that jokes about dung is doing something deliberate. ⚑ Not established here: when the retail business was separated from the spa, whether Cowshed is owned by Soho House today, and the current number of spas.