The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too immaculate – you never feel that the chief executive of a media conglomerate will bounce past you on a space hopper eating a fishfinger sandwich and shouting into an iPhone.

I can’t tell you about human guests because I don’t see any

The Newt was Hadspen House until 2013, when it was bought by a family of South African billionaires. Before that it was one of those lost manor houses owned by Enlightenment–era lawyers who used sheep to cut the grass and shouted: ‘Dash, me wig!’ I would have preferred Hadspen then – as I prefer Haddon Hall and its dust to Chatsworth and its bling – but we would not have got in then.

The billionaires are called the Bekkers: they spread money on Hadspen like jam. Either they are lonely – I would keep Hadspen for myself – or they want to provide a wacky public service for people able to spend £1,000 on bed and breakfast. The house has only 23 rooms and is as close to the experience of pretending you are a South African billionaire living in a small country estate in Somerset as you will find.

Ah, stuff! They have a druid tree, a spa with indoor and outdoor pools, a chicken playground – the publicity material has a photograph of a chicken sitting in a suspended chair looking sullen, a cider press and a full-size reproduction of a Roman villa. There is a lit fire in a walled garden: is it for chickens? The ducks have a RIBA-inspired waterside residence to quack in. The bees are no less spoilt: they live in a series of hillside hives called Beezantium, and you can visit them as you might visit celebrities: on your knees. And the newts, you may ask? They named the company after them.

I can’t tell you about human guests because I don’t see any. I imagine they are frolicking in four-poster beds and reading design magazines. I only see green public rooms with smouldering fires and conventional art, labouring under the smooth application of money. I am told local tradesmen adore the Bekkers. They spend their days making dry-stone walls and bee Center Parcs. The gardeners may be less ecstatic. I don’t see a leaf on the ground in two days.

There are three restaurants: the Farmyard Kitchen and the Garden Café, which cater to day-trippers who must pay an entry fee, and the Botanicals Room in Hadspen House, which was once the billiard room. It has stripped panelling – there is nothing Blackadder-ish here – green sofas and a light fitting of golden balloons.

The food is grown, foraged, or coddled in the estate: you can stare out a cow you will eat. I order a glorious piece of once-sullen chicken with girolle mushrooms, barbecued corn, and tarragon from the kitchen garden; a good cut of British White beef with beef-fat potato and oyster mushroom; a tidy plate of Somerset cheeses. It is pleasing but numbing, with the quality of an anaesthetic. Beyond that there is nothing to feel: just envy.