I feel like an elegant, sophisticated lady. This is an unusual sensation for me, someone who was once described as sounding “…populaire” (Swiss French for “urchin”) next to my “Princess Diana” triplet. But there’s something about Monart Spa that feels expensive and graceful and perfect.
I had a voucher to celebrate “more than five years” at my job. Everyone else who’d reached their five years (or “more than”) had restaurant vouchers but those are a total waste of paper for me, so my boss conspired with a colleague and opted for spa vouchers instead. There was a time, back in the dim and distant past, when I’d have said I wasn’t a spa person but then I went to my first one and now I’m thoroughly converted.
Monart could convert pretty much the hardest anti-spa person. It’s in Poundbury, King Charles’ model town on the edge of Dorchester, an odd little place meant as a kind of eco-village/15-minute-town that’s somehow turned into an expensive ghost town. I know lots of people live there but you never see them. Monart is in the Royal Pavilion, which should be the heart of the community but instead it’s expensive apartments that the developer believes will bring Kensington to Dorset and it has this glorious spa on the ground floor. It manages to be colourful but muted and peaceful at the same time – the insides of the lockers are painted a brighter shade of Tiffany green and there’s a lot of gold in the relax room, where the beds are upholstered in a similar shade of green – and yet the overall impression is of dim, relaxing lighting without it being so dark that I struggle to get around. Don’t get me started on the changing rooms and showers at the Sky Lagoon!
In hindsight, probably most of the spas I’ve ever been to in my life are adult-only but this one feels it. My usual go-to, once or twice a year, is the one attached to Center Parcs and while it’s also wonderful, it has something of the theme park about it and although I don’t recall any children, it does have the vibe of the sort of place that could easily be overrun with children. Monart, on the other hand, feels like I’ve slipped into an exclusive Kensington or Mayfair spa, inhabited by rich ladies who lunch. And yet I don’t feel out of place there.
And it’s also not that expensive. Their 3-hour thermal experience is £79, with your own private lounger and the softest robe and use of the entire spa suite. That’s the same as the Center Parcs one, which definitely doesn’t feel as exclusive.
My personal favourite bit is the hydrotherapy pool, which is deep enough to stand up in, long enough to swim a bit in, has two neck massager jets and two underwater body massager jets and a bubble bed, although my absolute favourite is the chandelier, a riot of blue, green and smoky grey glass tendrils. I can quite happily drift up and down it, glide like an otter (probably looking more like a harbour seal) onto the bubble beds, go and get my neck and shoulders massaged by jets that aren’t designed, for once, to decapitate you, and hang over the edge, gazing idly into the relax room.
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As for the other facilities, I’ll have to go and look at the website to make sure I get them all. They’re all in glass-fronted cabins along a short corridor. The first on the left is the caldarium, a warmish room with heated stone-tiled seats in a sort of bronze, a very pleasant temperature to sit in for a long time. Second are the showers – plain showers on the left, experience showers on the right, all tiled in dark teal, navy and random gold dotted around. The effect is prettier than it sounds. I might tile my own bathroom like that. Next up is the steam room which smells strongly of herbs and is far too hot to sit down in. In fact, I think I struggled to just exist in there without my hands over my face to stop it burning off. Last is the 80° dry heat sanarium, which I persist in calling the sauna. It’s a slightly yellow-lit room with pale wood benches and a kind of electric stove thing. The part of me that cooked in saunas in Helsinki last year wanted to tip water onto it – from the bucket sitting next to it, you are meant to. The part of me that remembers the electric fireplace of my childhood cannot.
At the very end is the ice fountain, where chips of ice fall down onto a miniature mountain. If you want to cool off after your sauna, but want to get really cold and not get in a shower, this is for you.
On the right is the the infra red pro cabin, where you sit in wooden seats facing wooden pillars and a 20-minute countdown directs infra red heat along your spine. It feels quite pleasant and you can zone out quite happily there but whenever you open your eyes, you’re facing a wooden pillar counting down your experience and that feels a bit less spa-like than I’m used to. Next to it is the Himalayan salt grotto, another tepid room with heated tiled seats and a wall made of paper-thin translucent yellow bricks. A blue circle of light on the wall periodically mists out something that I presume is salt but I’d expect that end of the room to be lightly caked in salt from being sprayed all day every day and it isn’t. And last, opposite the 80° sanarium, is the 60° moisture-infused sanarium which I call the dark sauna. This one doesn’t have a stove and it’s a lot darker in there. Other than that, I don’t feel a great deal of difference between the two sanariums. One’s light and one’s dark. Pick your favourite atmosphere, not your favourite heat.
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Really, I just like to waft between different sources of hot bubbly water when I’m at a spa but with my Finnish head on (and also the part of me that was going to have to report back on the experience to the boss, and the part that decided to expand that into a blog post), I went and tried out everything.
I can barely stay in the steam room for a minute. I find steam rooms unbearably hot and stifling and this one was exceptionally hot. On my first attempt in the light sauna, I managed about two minutes, according to the egg timer. On my second attempt, I’d had a cold shower before I went in and with my body temperature lowered, I managed five whole minutes – although admittedly, four of them were spent staring at the timer. I did try to alternate the saunas with either ice or cold showers. That’s what you’re supposed to do, hot-cold-hot-cold. I had a couple of goes at sitting in the salt room, because that’s a good place to sit on your own in silence and think. I did one round of infra red and decided that 20 minutes is a big chunk of your time when you only have 3 hours. The caldarium is another nice place to sit in the warm and let your mind wander.
As with many spas, they do have an idea about how you should be spending your time. In this particular case, there was a sign up on the wall by the hydro pool, a kind of “road map” of which cabins you should visit, in which order, and how long to stay there but they also say that you should listen to your body. Mine screams at me if I’m in one of the hot rooms for longer than a couple of minutes. Really, my question is where do the cooler rooms fit into the hot-cold cycle? I flit between them and the pool fairly randomly but this is the sort of spa where you kind of feel like you should be achieving some kind of correct spa process for optimum wellness rather than treating as a water theme park.
I didn’t make use of my personal lounger, nor of the reading nook beds. I’m sure they’re delightful and maybe I would if I was there for the whole day but if I want to lie on a bed and snooze… well, I can do that at home without paying for the privilege. I was spending every minute of my three hours in the thermal suite. Being a spa, it also offers various treatments – massages of all kinds, beauty treatments, the usual. It did cross my mind that it would be nice to have my nails done because I haven’t had time to paint them myself for months, but again, I’d rather spend the time in the hot water.
Three hours were up all too soon and now we got to the undignified part of the day. It was all very well having the changing rooms to myself when I arrived but there were four of us trying to get showered and dressed when I left and there are no private cubicles and the towels are small. If I was in Iceland or Finland, I’d just change and be unconcerned who’s seeing what. But that’s not how the UK works. So after a beautiful three hours, I had a very awkward five minutes before I could get back outside, fully dressed again. I’d also like to sit at the beautiful dressing tables and dry my hair but that’s another waste of my three hours.
Will I go back? Yes. For one thing, I still have 45 minutes’ worth of vouchers to spend and for another, it’s just nice. A cold winter evening, I think. This time was that hot weekend ten or so days ago and when it’s that hot, you don’t really want to think about sitting in hot water – although once you’re inside, you can forget that outside even exists. But the prospect of a sauna and a hydro pool on a miserable freezing grey day will be wonderful.