Sustainability Spotlight: Broomhill Estate

About The Broomhill Estate

The Broomhill Estate is a sanctuary for fine arts featuring a 7-bed boutique art hotel which sits at the heart of an ancient forest featuring hundreds of sculptures. The hotel is newly refurbished, and each room has been inspired by such cult films as Amelie, Clockwork Orange, Moonrise Kingdom, Betty Blue, Lost in Translation.

The hotel offers a refined dining restaurant called Broomhill Dining, a Terrace Café overlooking the sculpture gardens serving cakes and light bites, and the Broomhill Larder Deli.

Lunch is served daily from 12 – 4pm and you can choose from a casual artisan menu showcasing ingredients from Broomhill Farm alongside foraged foods.

Dinner – served daily from 6 to 11pm – is a refined dining experience featuring an a la carte menu of seasonal produce. It’s a culinary adventure. Broomhill gives its chefs the freedom to create new menus for each season.

The Estate also as plays host to events, including conferences, supper clubs and immersive dining experiences, workshops and weddings.

Food Drink Devon spoke to General Manager, Jacqui Dabell, about the Estate’s drive towards becoming ever more sustainable and self sufficient:

What have you done to make your business more environmentally friendly?

Everything served at Broomhill Dining is seasonal. To us that means from the ground, outdoors in spring, summer, autumn or winter. This means that the produce is at its best and delivers amazing flavours to punctuate the dish. Anything we do use which is ‘out of season’ will have been preserved, fermented or stored by us in our larder.

Broomhill Estate has created its own farm in the grounds. We are growing as much as we can ourselves. Anything we don’t produce is sourced from within 50 miles of the estate, a radius which we will tighten as we progress.

Our dishes also include foraged ingredients such as mushrooms, magnolia, hogweed, sorrel, nettles, cleavers, meadow sweet and herb bennet.

As a busy business we are striving towards reducing our waste. We would love to become carbon neutral and zero waste. One step along the journey to achieving this ambition is putting ‘waste products’ to good use. Current strategies to minimise waste include recycling our coffee grounds to grow mushrooms, composting for the farm, recycling oil, recycling jars and containers to reuse in our larder, sustainable takeaway products, recycling cardboard as planters for veg… and we even use our natural spring to fill the toilets.

Broomhill Estate is an accredited member of the UNESCO Biosphere Project. Biosphere reserves promote solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use.

These are learning areas for sustainable development under diverse ecological, social and economic contexts, touching the lives of more than 250 million people. There are currently 727 biosphere reserves in 131 countries, including 22 transboundary sites that belong to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.

What would you like to change in the future to improve your sustainability credentials further?

• We are developing an agroforest. We’re working with ‘Trees for a Good Cause’ to plant out a new forest.
• There is an issue with labour so we are going to utilise new technologies to help with tree management to reduce labour costs.
• We will continue to expand our biodiverse planting scheme by introducing plants which are medicinal, edible and support the ecosystem.
• We are increasing the amount of produce we grow on our farm.
• Investing in on site energy generation including ground source heat pumps, hydroelectric and solar.
• To increase accessibility for the general public and reduce vehicle movement and pollution, we plan to start a shuttle bus system in the local area to help people get moving and reduce emissions: The Broom Bus will be launching very soon!

What tips do you have for other businesses that would like to become more sustainable?

• Consider partnering with and supporting Not For Profits such as ‘Trees for a Good Cause’ which offsets carbon usage by planting trees.
• Using spare space to grow plants which encourages biodiversity and cross pollination.
• Use the UNESCO Biosphere website as a resource
• Recycle, reduce and re-use as much as you can.
• Partner with and use suppliers and services which hold the same principles.

Visit the Broomhill Estate website