Gravetye Manor

Heritage is the most double-edged asset in hospitality. It's the reason people choose you, and it's the reason a younger, higher-spending guest scrolls past without stopping.

Gravetye Manor has an Elizabethan manor house dating to 1598, more than 1,000 acres of Sussex countryside, and gardens laid out by William Robinson - arguably the most influential English gardener of the nineteenth century. There is a great deal of history here, and it was all on the website.

That was rather the problem.

Lemongrass Marketing, a B Corp-certified travel communications agency, delivered a full content audit and website restructure for Gravetye Manor, a historic country house hotel set in over 1,000 acres of English countryside.

Lemongrass Marketing delivered:

• A redesigned website that better reflects the brand
• Restructured content with clear navigation and hierarchy
• Improved UX, driving a more engaging and intuitive user journey
• A defined content hierarchy balancing heritage with a contemporary tone

Gravetye Manor faced several connected problems with its website. The primary issue was a lack of organisation and structure, making it difficult for visitors to navigate the site and find relevant information.

That structural weakness had a commercial consequence: it was actively hindering the brand's ability to target and engage a younger, more affluent audience. The content audit was the route to revamping the online presence and bringing it back into line with what that audience actually wanted.

We audited before we touched the design

We began with a comprehensive content audit assessing performance, relevance and gaps across the existing site.

This ordering matters more than it sounds. A website that feels wrong is almost always a content problem wearing a design costume - pages that exist for internal reasons, hierarchies that reflect the org chart rather than the guest's decision, information that was added once and never removed. Redesigning without auditing simply makes those problems more attractive.

We built a hierarchy around the guest's actual questions

The audit's findings defined a clearer site structure and content hierarchy, focused on simplifying navigation and ensuring every page served one clear purpose.

For a property like Gravetye, the honest question is what a prospective guest needs to know in what order - and the answer is rarely "the full history of the house, first."

We rebalanced the tone rather than abandoning the heritage

The brief was to reach a younger, more affluent audience, and the lazy version of that is to strip out the history and talk about wellness.

We went the other way. The heritage is the differentiator; a 1598 manor house with Robinson gardens is not something a competitor can build. What needed to change was the register - refining messaging so the history read as remarkable rather than reverent, and balancing it against a more contemporary voice.

A redesigned website that better reflects the brand, restructured content with clear navigation and hierarchy, and improved UX driving a more engaging and intuitive user journey.

The content audit gave Gravetye Manor the means to revamp its online presence and align it far more closely with the aspirations of the audience it wanted to attract - without discarding the four centuries of history that made it worth visiting in the first place.

What is a website content audit? A structured assessment of every page on a site, evaluating performance, relevance and gaps. The findings inform decisions about what to keep, cut, rewrite or restructure - and should precede any redesign work.

Why audit content before redesigning a website? Most navigation and usability problems originate in content structure rather than visual design. Redesigning without auditing tends to preserve the underlying issues in a more attractive form.

How can a heritage hotel appeal to a younger audience without losing its character? By adjusting tone and content hierarchy rather than removing heritage. Gravetye Manor's rebuild retained its historic story while refining the register and restructuring the site around guest decision-making.