Our story
Before Camp Kerala was born there was a barrister on the last stretch of her career, a valley in Somerset she’d only just found and a family who had no idea what they were about to build.
Two GENERATIONS of the same instinct
Camp Kerala began as one woman’s idea, sparked on a trip halfway across the world and has since become an iconic blend of family and inspiration. What Jen found in Kenya and later built with a single family of craftsmen in Rajasthan, has stayed at the heart of Camp Kerala for over twenty years. Her family have since taken up the reins, adding their own energy to hers and carrying the idea somewhere she never quite imagined. Read our story below.
There is a certain frequency in the air during life’s big moments
The house at the bottom of the VALLEY
Jen went straight from school into law and was called to the bar in 1978 and remarkably soon after, on her feet in court, back in an era when a phone could not place you anywhere and DNA had not yet entered a courtroom. It was a life built on instinct rather than certainty, on long days that ran into longer evenings and though nothing in her was consciously looking for a change, by her mid-forties something in her had quietly begun to want one.
A property searcher found a house at the bottom of a Somerset valley and told her, simply, to come and see it. She drove up from Cornwall with barely a plan, arrived in October to find the valley turned entirely to gold and rust around her and knew, in the way you know very few things in life, that this was it: a house set deep among fields and hedgerows, with nothing for company but birdsong and open sky. The estate agent had called it “a lost and tranquil valley” and for most of the year, that was exactly what it was. It also happened to sit right beside the world’s greatest festival, whose fields, though she could not have known it then, were about to reshape the entire course of her life.
A TENT she could not forget
Years before any of this, Jen was staying in a tented camp in Kenya’s Masai Mara and found herself completely taken with the tents themselves, unlike anything she had stayed in before and unmistakably special. She asked the camp’s general manager where they had come from, half expecting an answer somewhere closer to home, Cape Town perhaps, or another corner of South Africa. Instead, he said one word: Jodhpur. In Rajasthan.
She held onto that word for years, long after the safari itself had faded into memory. So when it finally came time to work out what Camp Kerala’s own tents should look like, there was only ever one place to start. Jen got on a plane to Jodhpur and that is where she met the Maharaja of Jodhpur, just then starting a business of his own manufacturing the beautiful Shikar tents he had grown up around, creating jobs for the people of Rajasthan and Jodhpur as he did it. Raj, who led production on the ground, still makes Camp Kerala’s tents to this day. It was 2004, a year before the first Shikar tent would ever go up in a field in Somerset and the beginning of a partnership that has never really stopped.
CHAOS, canvas & Rajasthan
Camp Kerala began in 2005 and Jen genuinely believed it would amount to little more than pin money, a passion project to see them through the summer. The tents themselves came all the way from India, held up in customs until the Tuesday night with guests due to arrive on the Thursday morning and not a single instruction in the crate, so family and
friends spent those last frantic hours putting them up by hand while a storm settled over the site and refused to leave. By every reasonable measure, it should have been the end of the whole idea. Instead, it turned out to be only the beginning.
Word spread faster than anyone had planned for and soon there were guests booking tents dozens at a time, having only read about them in the newspaper. A young musician stayed that summer too, singing in the little horse shelter long before the rest of the world caught up with him and returned years later to play the main stage. The following year,
it emerged that the tents had been sprayed in India with the wrong flame-retardant and had faded to a strange, faint green at the seams, so the family sent them home to Rajasthan and received an entirely new set in return, proof of just how far that partnership was willing to go for Camp Kerala, even in its very first year.
A WORLD that keeps growing
Camp Kerala was never going to stay in Somerset, not really. What began as a single field of tents has grown year upon year into theatrical restaurants, a spa, a salon, an entire village of its own and soon a pub to sit at the heart of it all. The same restless instinct that first sent Jen to Rajasthan in search of the right tents has since carried Camp Kerala out into the world’s other great spectacles: the fairways of the Ryder Cup in Adare, Silverstone, the humid, kaleidoscopic energy of Wonderfruit in Thailand. As Jen likes to say, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Fredrick Nietzsche) and every waterlogged year, every near-disaster, every season when nothing went quite to plan taught the business exactly what it needed to build next.
The children who came HOME
It all began, quite literally, in a spare bedroom with white carpet, until one exploding pen ended that particular experiment and the office finally moved somewhere more suitable for the growth to come. Around the same time, Georgia left for Oxford Brookes, Freya for Bath and Bert for Exeter and the summers they had once spent simply helping out at home slowly became something their university friends wanted a part of too, drawn in one by one until half the team seemed to have met through somebody’s daughter or somebody’s son.
Each of them went out first and built a life of their own, Georgia and Freya into the world of events, Bert onto a steady path in the City. But they had grown up watching their mother turn one enchanting idea into something genuinely extraordinary and none of them, in the end, could quite shake the pull of wanting to be part of it. So, one by one, they found their way home. Now Georgia has a way of appearing out of nowhere and landing on exactly the right idea. Bert is the one who holds it all together, steady no matter what the day throws at him. And Freya turns the smallest detail into forward motion, keeping the whole team in step.
An eye for what is out THERE
What keeps Camp Kerala moving is not really a plan so much as an appetite for new places, unfamiliar textures and better ways of doing the same incredible things. The family has been fortunate enough to see a great deal of the world together and somewhere between a hotel in Italy and a market on the other side of the globe, there is always someone catching the one detail worth bringing home that they know will fill their guests with wonder. That, more than anything, is the real engine of the business, then and now: a good eye, the desire to keep evolving and the instinct to know exactly what is special enough to enhance our worlds.
Where it is led US
What has never changed is the drive to go where no one else has, to try the thing that has not been tried and to treat every season as another chance to get closer to the best version of what Camp Kerala can be. That appetite for experimenting, for learning fast and correcting course faster, has taken the business a long way further than pin money ever could.
Along the way, the standard has been set by working alongside some of the most exceptional personalities and craftspeople in their fields, the kind of collaborators who push every detail that bit further and raise what the family once thought was possible. And through every version of the business, from a spare bedroom to a village of its own, the one constant has been each other. It is the family unit, more than any single idea, that has held Camp Kerala together through every wet year, every reinvention and every leap into the unknown.
Twenty years on from a delayed shipment of tents and a valley that would be changed forever, Camp Kerala is still run on precisely the same instinct it started with: go further, dare more and never stop dreaming.
Discover our worlds
Experiences
A Camp Kerala world is one of intense craft, immersive beauty, deep care, total calm and no compromise. It prepares you for the rush of the occasion and provides a restorative sanctuary for the afterglow to settle.
Events
Camp Kerala designs and delivers bespoke events for brands, families and individuals. MOMENTS crafted for resonance, never forgotten so they’ll never truly be over.
The Camp Kerala team
These guys and girls are the heartbeat of everything we do, people who can read a room better than a script. Their eye for detail and obsession for warm and genuine hospitality, is what sustains the atmosphere, ensuring energy never dips from first contact to final round-up.
Jennifer Oldland
Chairperson
Bert Broughton
Managing Director
Georgia Broughton
Partner & Business Development
Freya Broughton
Managing Director
Michelle Webber
Head of Office
Emily Syphas
Director of Marketing, Sales & Partnerships
Dan Bryant
Director of Innovations
Thea Hurley-Bennett
Marketing & Partnerships Lead
Becky Clements
Director of Operations
Helena Du Cros
Strategic Events Lead
Darren
Store Maintenance Manager
Ian Alexander
Maestro de Cuisine
Arron Collins-Thomas
Lead Practitioner at SHIFT
