South African billionaire Koos Bekker opens $14,000-a-night lodge in second English village

The Newt in Somerset, the English country estate owned by South African billionaire Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, has opened a 16-bedroom private house that rents from £10,500 a night, about $14,100, extending the couple's footprint into a second Somerset village.

Yarlington Lodge opened on June 1 in the village of Yarlington, roughly a mile from the main estate at Hadspen House. The property sits within 12 acres of restored gardens, woodland and grounds, and completes a multi-year restoration led by Roos with the architecture practice Richard Parr Associates.

The expansion arrives weeks after residents of Castle Cary, the nearby town where Bekker has bought the Creamery Cafe at the railway station, a delicatessen, a beauty parlour, several high street businesses and The George, a 600-year-old pub now closing for refurbishment, launched a campaign urging visitors to boycott his businesses.

What the rate buys

The Grade II listed site centres on a Regency rectory and consists of three residences. The main lodge holds eight bedrooms, two of which form a family suite with a shared bathroom. The Coach House, converted from former stables and a carriage store, holds four. Cottage in the Wall, once a gardener's cottage, holds another four. Together they sleep up to 32 guests.

The three buildings share a historic walled garden, formal lawns, an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a croquet lawn, a cinema room, a speakeasy bar and a glasshouse used for dining. The rate covers exclusive use of all 16 bedrooms and includes a 12-month membership of The Newt from the date of stay.

Each bedroom in the main house is named after a literary character of the Regency period, among them Jane Bennet and Natalya Rostova, with the corresponding novel placed beside the bed. A butler team arranges spa treatments, personal trainers, childcare and nanny services. Guests can cook in fully equipped kitchens or draw on estate chefs working with produce from The Newt's kitchen gardens, butchery, dairy and creamery. The land was granted by Henry VIII to Catherine Parr, his last wife.

Rooms at the main Newt hotel start at £795 a night, roughly $1,070, across 42 bedrooms at Hadspen and the Farmyard accommodation opened in 2020.

The expansion has drawn local resistance

Bekker and Roos bought Hadspen House, then set in about 800 acres, for £12 million in 2013 and opened it as a hotel in 2019. The estate now runs to roughly 3,000 acres, with 40 gardening staff tending 12 distinct gardens.

The project has brought around 600 jobs to Castle Cary, and local estate agents have credited it with sustaining trades and employment. The benefits have not landed evenly. House prices in the town sit 23.9 percent above the national average, a gap residents attribute to the estate's expanding presence, and the steady acquisition of high street premises has narrowed what remains in local hands.

The Newt also faced criticism in May over the use of weedkiller on grounds marketed heavily on their ecological credentials. The estate produces its own cyder, runs a working farm and built a structure called the Beezantium around the study of bees.

Bekker has acknowledged that The Newt is not yet profitable after more than a decade and roughly $334 million of investment.

Funded by share sales

The spending has been financed largely by selling down the technology holdings that built the fortune. A family trust linked to Bekker sold $184 million of Naspers and Prosus shares in 2024 and a further $150 million across three trading days in December 2025. Both companies stated at the time that the proceeds would fund building operations at hospitality venues in South Africa, the United Kingdom and Italy in which the trust holds an interest.

Bekker led Naspers as chief executive when it invested about $34 million in the Chinese internet company Tencent in 2001, acquiring a stake of 46.5 percent that was worth roughly $167 billion by 2018, when Naspers began selling down. Forbes valued him at about $3.5 billion earlier this year, down from $4 billion in January as Naspers and Prosus shares fell more than 24 percent.

A portfolio across four countries

The couple bought Babylonstoren, a wine estate of about 2,600 acres in South Africa's Cape Winelands, in 2007, and Roos oversaw its conversion into a hotel and garden destination. They added Vignamaggio, a 1,000-acre estate near Greve in Chianti in Tuscany, which is under renovation for a 2027 opening, and a farm near Amsterdam. In February 2024 they opened Blou, a small beachside retreat near Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape reserved for guests of Babylonstoren or The Newt.

The Newt sponsored the Chelsea Flower Show from 2022 before stepping back last year. In May it launched its own nine-day horticultural festival, the Great Garden Show, positioning the estate as a rival to the event it previously backed.