The Five-Star Hotel You Didn't Know Was a Farm

There is a moment, somewhere between the gate and the manor house at Natirar, when the math stops adding up. You are in New Jersey. You are forty-five minutes from Manhattan. And yet the land rolls out in every direction like someone forgot to stop building it. Five hundred acres of it. 

Built in 1912 by a Quaker oil heiress. Purchased in 1983 by the King of Morocco — on the advice of Malcolm Forbes. Today it's Pendry Natirar. A five-star hotel on a working farm in New Jersey, sitting on 500 acres in Somerset County, forty-five minutes from Manhattan.

Most people have never heard of it. 

Farm & Manor visited before we wrote a word.

THE ESTATE

The name is an anagram. Natirar is Raritan spelled backwards — a nod to the river that runs through the property for two miles. Kate Macy Ladd named it herself when she and her husband Walter began acquiring land in the Somerset Hills in 1905.

Ladd was an oil heiress, a Quaker, and a philanthropist. She opened Natirar's doors to convalescing women who needed rest and couldn't afford it. The mansion — 33,000 square feet of Tudor brick, limestone trim, and slate roof, completed in 1912 — was designed by Guy Lowell, the architect behind the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was never built for glamour. It was built for purpose.

Under the terms of Walter Ladd's will, the estate was to be sold fifty years after his death. In 1983, it was. King Hassan II of Morocco purchased it for $7.5 million — introduced to the property by his friend Malcolm Forbes — to have a residence near Princeton University, where his sons were studying. By most accounts, Hassan never spent a single night under the slate roof. He visited three or four times. When he died in 1999, the estate passed to his son, Mohammed VI, who sold it to Somerset County in 2003 for $22 million.

Pendry Hotels opened here in October 2024. What they inherited — and what they are still learning how to carry — is one of the most quietly remarkable pieces of land on the Eastern Seaboard.

THE HOTEL

Every corner of this place feels like a painting. The interiors, the grounds, the light. DesignAgency preserved what was already there — the original limestone foyer, the stone fireplaces, the ornate plaster ceilings, the warm oak paneling — and layered in contemporary furniture, curated art, and a palette that makes Pinterest blush. 

The Great Room anchors the original mansion. Stone fireplace, soaring wood-paneled walls, plaster ceilings that have been there for over a century. 

The Library sits beside it — dark paneling, original from 1912, preserved and untouched. Leaded windows look out over the North Branch of the Raritan. 

The 68 guest rooms and suites — including 21 suites — are designed to feel like a weekend at a wealthy friend's country estate. Walk-in wardrobes. Marble bathrooms with rain showers. Vittoria espresso machines. The king suite overlooks the whole property. 

One more thing: Pendry is a dog-friendly brand across all properties. Dog beds in rooms. Dogs are welcome everywhere on the estate except the farm and inside the restaurants — the Ladd's Tavern patio is fair game.

LADD'S TAVERN

Named after Catherine 'Kate' Macy Ladd herself. The all-day dining room sits adjacent to the Great Room inside the mansion — a classic, countryside-leaning menu that runs breakfast through late night. Cocktails, afternoon tea, light bites, and a patio that looks out over the estate.

I was told by the staff that the burger is something that couldn’t be missed on the menu, so naturally we had to indulge, and they weren’t wrong. 

Ninety Acres, the property's signature fine dining restaurant, completes the picture. Farm-to-table, chef-driven, seasonal. 

THE FARM

The Farm at Natirar is twelve working acres of organic, sustainable, regenerative farmland sitting on the property. It grows the produce, herbs, florals, and microgreens that supply the kitchens at Ninety Acres and Ladd's Tavern. There are over 100 free-range hens. There are sheep. There is a full apiary on site. The eggs on your breakfast plate were collected that morning.

Melinda has been running it for four seasons. She arrived before the hotel was built — working directly with ownership, not Pendry corporate — with a mandate she took seriously.

"I came in from a restorative perspective. Getting the soil content back to where it needed to be, figuring out what we wanted the husbandry practice to be, how we were going to rotate pastures and crop fields."

The land had been depleted. Coming out of COVID, the restaurant had been running intermittently, and the farm had lost momentum. Melinda rebuilt it from the soil up. The terrain here is rocky, which made root vegetables a challenge. The first two years were largely spent figuring out how to get beets, carrots, and radish to flourish. Raised beds. No-till practices. Patient, season-by-season iteration.

What she built is not a show farm and that distinction matters when we visit farm hotels across the world. 

"Ownership said — once the hotel comes on property, please try to keep it authentic. Not a show."

Melinda works with a network of over 400 farms in Somerset County. The farm's mission is never to pretend it feeds everything — it's twelve acres — but to be transparent about what it does grow, and to inspire the chefs and guests around what's actually in season. She runs specials based on what's being harvested that week. When something runs out, it runs out, and that’s the point. 

"What I'm trying to inspire is seasonality — to educate the chefs on what's growing is what we should be eating. What New Jersey farming means."

The farm is currently expanding to more working acres. Plans are in development for a CSA available to hotel guests, Natirar Club members, and residents. A sixty-foot pergola for dining in the field is currently being installed in the kitchen garden. There will be dinners among the crops and we are impatiently waiting for that invitation. 

THE EXPERIENCES

The Farm at Natirar is exclusively open to resort guests and Natirar Club members. What's available to you is genuinely unlike what most hotels offer — and most of the people who stay here don't know to ask for it.

You can spend a morning as a beekeeper. You can harvest your own herbs and vegetables and take them directly into a cooking class at Ninety Acres. You can collect the eggs that appear on your breakfast plate. You can spend time with the sheep and the free-range hens. There are honey and herb infusion workshops. Floral design experiences. The farm distills its own lavender hydrosol, available through Spa Pendry. The programming changes with the seasons.

"My team's mission is to welcome and embrace from a stewardship perspective — to get people comfortable, educate them, but from a way of fun and excitement and celebration. You can go lay by a pool anywhere. The farm is what makes people want to come back."

BEYOND THE PROPERTY

Here's what the hotel team told us — and what we didn't fully appreciate until we heard it said plainly. The guests who come here are primarily from the NYC metro corridor, escaping concrete. What they want is quiet, vastness, openness and Natirar delivers it on property. But what surrounds it is the part most people miss who desire a longer stay. 

Peapack-Gladstone is ten minutes away — a genuinely charming boutique downtown, worth a morning on its own. Bernardsville has serious dining; Bernard's Inn is an iconic partner property and worth a dinner reservation if you have the nights. Chester is fifteen minutes in the other direction — charming, historic, and the hotel has active partnerships with local businesses there. Jersey Tourism is coming in to cover Chester and the surrounding area, which signals where the regional conversation is heading.

Hacklebarney Cider Mill is the local institution. Melinda mentioned it to us unprompted — she wants guests to go, and she's working on bringing their apple pressing onto the property in the fall as a seasonal event. A 120-year-old herb farm sits twenty minutes out, where the great-grandmother is still drying flowers and the grandsons are working the fields. We didn't get to either but we are in the works of returning to explore it all. 

The honest version of a Natirar visit is three to four nights. Most people give it one and they’re missing out on enjoying the hotel amenities at its fullest, including the farm experiences and then getting to dive into neighboring small towns to enjoy the quaintness of New Jersey. 

THE BIGGER PICTURE

There's a category emerging in American hospitality that doesn't have a clean name yet. It's not a resort. It's not a farm stay. It's not agritourism. It's something older than all of those — an estate that has always been tied to land, now remembering what that means.

Natirar is one of those delightful examples in New Jersey. 

What Melinda is building is something rarer than a good hotel farm programme. It's an argument — patient, seasonal, rooted in the land — that luxury and agriculture are not in conflict.

"I want to rewild people’s lives. Create this much-needed reconnection to lineage and tradition. Everything — The AI, the tech, all of it — it’s not going away. It’s more about learning how to have these parallels cross.” 

We think Pendry Natirar — if it continues to let the farm lead — will be one of the more important hospitality stories in the Northeast over the next decade.

Words & photographs by Leah Judson.