Foxtons founder Jon Hunt has turned his attention to posh British holidays with Wilderness Reserve... and here's why stars like Alexa Chung are hooked

•  Foxtons founder Jon Hunt owns the Wilderness Reserve, a 5,000-acre estate in rural Suffolk 
•  Among lawn, wetlands and forest are manor houses, cottages  and farmhouses available as holiday lets 
• Just an hour from London, it has become a hit with stars like Daisy Lowe, Jack Guinness and Alexa Chung

As the founder of Foxtons, it’s no exaggeration to say that Jon Hunt is at least partly responsible for the huge increase in London property prices over the past 20 years.

The father-of-four checked out of the estate agency business some time ago though and is now spending just as much time and energy on what some might say is an equally large project – Wilderness Reserve in Suffolk.

The sprawling estate in the middle of the Suffolk countryside is like Soho Farmhouse on steroids – thousands of acres of manicured lawns, wetlands and forest, dotted with renovated estate homes and farmhouses, one including a moat, that are all available as holiday lets.

And at the centre of it all is the Grade I listed Heveningham Hall - an enormous 25-bedroom mansion that could give Downton Abbey a run for its money. This is the Hunt family home.

Hunt and his wife Lois bought Heveningham Hall more than a decade ago and in the following years he has slowly bought up more and more land surrounding it, including a number of crumbling stately homes, which have all slowly been turned into grand holiday lets. 

The grand idea is for there to be five satellite country estates around the centre point of Heveningham Hall.

Millions and millions has gone into restoring the properties to their former glory and converting the farmland into estate land, with grand plans for marshlands that spread for acres, as well as building new properties on the land. 

This is no rushed job though - a great deal of detail has gone into each renovation, with much attention paid to how the buildings originally looked. 

Wilderness Reserve has a permanent team of restoration experts who work on the properties, some who have been there for almost 20 years, who make sure that everything from the windows to the paint colour is historically correct.  

Unsurprisingly, with its location just an hour from London, the Wilderness Reserve has already become a huge hit with celebrities like Daisy Lowe and Jack Guinness.

In fact, fashionista Alexa Chung thought it was so brilliant that last year she held her birthday in one of the larger holiday lets, the 12-bedroom Georgian manor house Sibton Park, which comes with its own chef.

Tempted with the idea of a weekend away from the big smoke, my boyfriend and I packed our bags and headed out to Suffolk for a couple of days, opting for the smallest property on offer at Wilderness Reserve called Hex cottage – a tiny one-bedroom house that doesn’t even have electricity.

Much like Hunt knew how to make grown men and women tick when it came to a Victorian terraced house in Clapham or an overpriced studio in Hackney, he also knows exactly what buttons to press when it comes to a country weekend break.

Our home away from home looked like a cross between the Seven Dwarves’ home in Snow White and the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel… in short, it was the stuff that dreams are made of.

The woodman’s cottage is the place where couples often go to spend the night after their wedding at Sibton Hall on the estate, and it’s not hard to see why. 

Inside, the décor was the ultimate in shabby chic, with a quaint kitchen, complete with a wood-burning Aga that fuelled all of the hot water in the house (just call the staff and they’ll top it up for you when you aren’t there though).

The living room had a wood fire, as did the bedroom, there were enough candles to light up the Albert Hall, and even a jar of marshmallows to toast on sticks in the evening.  

The lack of electricity really adds to the charm of the place as you snuggle up under candlelight of an evening, but it also means that it is only doable for a couple of nights as a lack of refrigerator is a pretty big hindrance.

For a short trip, the staff have you covered though. 

A welcome package of charcuterie, cheese and bread are waiting on the kitchen table as you arrive and in the morning, bacon, eggs and the newspapers are waiting in the outside pantry when you wake up. 

Alternatively, you can enlist the services of a Wilderness Reserve chef to come and cook your evening meal. 

For anyone looking for a restaurant meal though, there are plenty of options to choose from in the local area.

On the Saturday evening, we opted for The Anchor pub at Walberswick, a traditional 1920s inn. 

Given its proximity to the sea, the menu had a large amount of seafood and fish dishes to choose from - we ate a delicious meal of local oysters, followed by crab gratin and smoked haddock and salmon fishcakes, topped off with boozy orange pancakes.

Thankfully, the pub is just four minutes' walk from a shingle beach, so we rolled down to the shore to walk it off. 

There are plenty of activities to be enjoyed back on the estate too - much of Hunt's plan for the reserve focuses on its outdoor appeal. 

Guests can hire Pashley bikes and cycle around the grounds, or swim in the pool designed by leading landscape architect Kim Wilkie. 

Alternatively, grab a paddleboard or a rowing boat and explore the lake in Sibton Park. 

But where the reserve really comes into its own is the nature aspect - at the heart of Hall's Wilderness Reserve is his commitment to conservation. 

Over the last two decades, as well as renovating the properties, Hunt has been busy converting the surrounding arable land into a wild landscape, planting more than a million trees in the process. 

Many of them are just starting to mature properly now and more than 100 different bird species have been spotted on the grounds, including buzzards, raptors, and wetland species like Reed Bunting and Reed Warblers.

If you are particularly interested, there is a bird expert who can take you on a tour of the grounds, as well as a resident moth expert.

If you fancy getting out and about for the day, within 10 minutes' drive is the Suffolk coastline, Westleton Heath nature reserve and RSPB Minsmere, a coastal nature reserve owned and run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 

The reserve is known as one of the UK's top bird-watching sites and when we were there, Springwatch were filming a segment on the resident wildlife for the TV show. 

There are nature trails to keep the children occupied, a huge beach that is perfect for dog walkers and a pub for anyone looking to catch a pint and some chips next to the sea. 

In short, this is a hearty, yet luxury country weekend away that would impress even the most dedicated city dweller. 

There is far too much to do in a weekend though. I wish that we had been there for a week to fully take advantage of everything the estate and surrounding area had to offer. 

So I will be going back. And next time I'm taking the house with the moat.