Who Owns The Newt in Somerset?

The Newt in Somerset is owned by a South African couple. Koos Bekker — chairman of the technology group Naspers — and his wife Karen Roos, a former magazine editor, bought the Hadspen House estate near Castle Cary in 2013 and opened it as a hotel and garden in 2019. It is privately held, has no group above it, and is the English counterpart of their South African estate, Babylonstoren. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Newt in Somerset today?

Two people. Koos Bekker and Karen Roos bought the Grade II-listed Hadspen House and its roughly 800-acre estate in 2013, and spent six years rebuilding it before opening in 2019.

Roos, a former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, led the design. Bekker is the businessman behind it — as chief executive of Naspers he made the investment in Tencent that became one of the most profitable venture bets ever made, and which is the source of the fortune behind the estate.

The couple live in Cape Town. The Newt is privately owned by individuals, not by a hotel group, a fund or a company anyone can buy into.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

There is no parent and no group. The Newt is not part of a chain, and it is not connected to Naspers or its listed vehicle Prosus — those are separate businesses in which Bekker is an executive and shareholder, not owners of the Somerset estate.

That distinction matters and is easily blurred. Wealth derived from a listed company is not the same as ownership by it. Naspers shareholders have no interest in The Newt.

Identifying the operating company on Companies House is the practical difficulty, and this page is candid about it: I could not identify it by name search. Searching for “Newt” or “Hadspen” returns quarrying, glamping and unrelated local businesses at the same postcode — Hadspen Quarry Ltd, Hadspen Glamping Limited, Hadspen Valley Ltd — none of which is the estate.

Rather than attach the brand to a company number I cannot verify, this page names none. The reliable route for a reader is the officer search: Companies House can be searched by a person’s name, and looking up the owners directly will surface their companies where a brand-name search will not.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

Bekker and Roos hold it between them. The split has not been publicly disclosed, and this page does not estimate it.

No outside investor, hotel group or fund has been reported as holding a stake. The estate has been funded privately throughout, which is why it could be closed for six years of rebuilding before earning anything — a timescale no business answerable to outside investors could sustain.

That places The Newt with JCB, bet365, Matchroom, Alo and Sandbanks in the category this site keeps returning to: privately held, owner-controlled, and answerable to nobody else.

Official records and evidence

This page rests on the owners’ own accounts and on press and trade coverage of the 2013 purchase and the 2019 opening. It is not register-verified, and that is stated rather than glossed.

The estate’s ownership would be on the PSC register once the correct company is identified — a private company of this size has no exemption, so anyone holding more than 25% must be named. The limitation here is a search problem, not a disclosure one.

HM Land Registry is the better register for this particular question. The Newt is fundamentally a piece of land with buildings on it, and title to an 800-acre Somerset estate is recorded there — including whether it is held by individuals or through a company, and any charges over it. For a landed estate, the land register answers more than the company register does.

Companies House does not verify most filed information.

Ownership history and changes

Hadspen House was the seat of the Hobhouse family from the eighteenth century, and its gardens were well known in the twentieth — Penelope Hobhouse, the garden writer, lived and worked there.

• 2013 — Bekker and Roos buy the estate.
• 2013–2019 — a complete rebuilding: gardens, hotel, restaurants, a cider press, a Roman villa reconstruction and a bee sanctuary.
• 2019 — opens as The Newt in Somerset, named after the great crested newts on the estate.

The name is the detail people find hardest to believe and it is straightforwardly true: a hotel of that price named itself after a protected amphibian.

The estate has not changed hands since 2013 and has had one ownership throughout.

Related companies and brands

The owners also hold Babylonstoren, a wine estate and hotel in the Cape Winelands that Bekker has owned since 2007 and which The Newt was explicitly modelled on. The two are sister properties under common personal ownership rather than a corporate group.

Bekker’s connection to Naspers and Prosus — and through them to a large holding in Tencent, which also appears on this site’s Reddit profile as a minority shareholder there — is a matter of his own shareholdings, not of The Newt’s ownership.

The Newt is not part of Relais & Châteaux-style ownership groups, nor connected to Soho House, Daylesford — owned by the Bamford family, covered on this site’s JCB profile — or any British hotel chain. It is a single estate with two owners.