We started work on the tea rooms at the beginning of 2014 with a building transformation of the entire ground floor. The previous owners of the garden centre lived in the house so it required a complete renovation to make it suitable for use as a business. Everything you see when you walk in is completely new. The main seating area was a living room with a flat ceiling. We have vaulted the ceiling and installed 2 Velux windows to allow lots of natural light to sweep in. The smaller seating area known as the snug was an office and has now been converted to seat 8 people at tables and 2 at tub chairs. We opened up the walls between the snug and main area to give the place that open feeling and we have also installed a real fire for those cold winter months so that you can come in from a long walk in the surrounding countryside and enjoy a lovely hot drink or bowl of soup by the fire. In total, around 47 people can be seated inside the tea room with a further 50-60 outside for those busy summer months. The toilets were once a large garage so these have been built up from scratch and everyone tells us they're lovely and clean all the time and always smell nice (which is good!)
The servery area was once a small dining area and again, we have opened this up so that it flows into the main area seamlessly. Our kitchen, well, lets just say that now its amazing and before it was a mess. You might recognise the theme of the team room wieghing heavily on next. That's not a mistake as a huge quantity of the accessories, lights and wall paper all came from next. The outside area 12 months ago looked more like Hockley woods. Bramble and nettles over 6ft high and small trees were everywhere. We ripped them up, cut the grass, installed deep beds using sleepers and then laid a fantastic patio and pathway leading from the garden centre which flows straight into the tea room. So, what do we serve? Well we're a tea room so as you would expect we serve tea. All tea is served loose in tea pots but we also serve a number of fruit and caffiene free teas. We serve the normal type of coffees you would expect as well as a large selection of cold drinks and smoothies. Our selection of food is second to none. We serve sandwiches on your choice of bread, panini's in over 5 different choices, jackets, omlets, quiche and great homemade soup (none of that processed rubbish). We serve big breakfast babs with bacon/sausage/egg until 11.30am every day and in the very near furture, a full english breakfast will be available at the weekend. In addition to all of that, we also have a great range of homemade cakes (very generous slices are the norm) cookies and scones. And finally, as you would expect from any self respecting tea room, we offer afternoon tea for a very competative £11.95 pp. So come down and see us. We love what we've done and we hope you will too.
