Activities

Luxury Family Hotels is a subsidiary brand of Von Essen Hotels.

Timeline

• 1989: Former accountant Nigel Chapman opens Woolley Grange in Wiltshire with his wife.
• 1994: Chapman teams up with Nicholas Dickinson to buy one of the UK’s oldest hotels from Arcadian International. The acquisition of the 750-year-old, 37-bedroom Old Bell in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, marks the birth of Luxury Family Hotels (LFH).
• 1996: Moonfleet Manor in Dorset joins the portfolio.
• 1997: LFH buys Fowey Hall in Exeter for £575,000 and reopens it in July 1998 after a £1.1m refurbishment.
• 1999: Dickinson and Chapman found Alias Hotels to run town house hotels aimed at younger business travellers after buying the Savoy hotel in Cheltenham, Gloucester, in April. They set up Luxury Hotel Management (LHM) as the parent company for both Alias and LFH.
• 2000: LFH wins the tender to develop a hotel in the East Wing of the National Trust’s Ickworth House estate in Suffolk, which it will run on a 99-year lease.
• 2001: The group sells the Old Bell for around £2.5m because its town centre location does not fit within the LFH brand.
• July 2002: Following a £2.5m refurbishment, the 27-bedroom Ickworth hotel opens in Suffolk, with 11 self-catering apartments housed in a nearby lodge.
• 2003: LFH becomes a standalone company again after it is separated from LHM in readiness for expansion at Alias Hotels.
• 2004: The group joins ShareMark, an online share auctioning market for small and medium businesses.
• May 2005: LFH reveals that it is in talks with a potential buyer.
• October 2005: Von Essen Hotels tables an offer in excess of £30m for LFH.
• December 2005: Von Essen's offer of in excess of £20m for Luxury Family Hotels is accepted by more than 90% of its 200 shareholders. Von Essen plans to invest £7.5m in refurbishing the four hotels, which will sit in a separate category that retains the Luxury Family Hotels name.
• May 2006: LFH puts the Ickworth hotel on the market for £7.5m while Von Essen tries to hammer out new terms with the National Trust on the restrictive leasehold terms. LFH is obliged to market the hotel during this process because it promised shareholders a return on the sale of 160p per share by 30 September.