Simply called The Residence, there's a hotel in Bath, England, that seems to hark back to Jane Austen days of exclusive clubs and high society--except that if we've got the cash, we can stay there too. There are just six rooms for guests but they are part of a larger complex inside an old Georgian house, with a restaurant, bar and gardens also accessible to members of the private club.
Recent guests at TripAdvisor can't speak highly enough of The Residence, with everyone loving the luxurious rooms and a few mentioning the "adults only" drawer, too! But a UK Telegraph review over the weekend was not quite as over-the-top impressed, citing short showers, erratic bar service and inadequate reading lights in bed--but it sounds like they might be a bit on the fussy side.
Monica Guy is fed up with the old guard hotels of the U.K. that may have entertained her grandparents when they were tripping all over the world in their youth but have since been lasting on reputation and little else. In this new feature, she pits her grandma's favorite hotel against some of the new hip hotels popping up across the rainy motherland. Enjoy.
So you'd won in Oxford and won in Cambridge - your slick boutique hotels were a hundred times smoother than gran and granddad's choice. Proves you can't sleep on a bed of reputation.
But your grandparents excelled themselves in Bath with the much discussed (in upper-class circles) Bath Priory. The quintessential hotel image of Englishness in a hotel that's worth its reputation.
Bath is a beautiful University city in the west of England, with hills as steep as the sides of houses and a newly opened working reconstruction of the healing Roman baths after which the city's named. It's increasingly on the tourist trail as visitors venture further and further out from London.
But Bath is as old as, well, the Romans, and there isn't much room for shiny new buildings. Hotels - anything from mangy tourist pickups to stylish boutique hotels such as the Queensbury hide behind Victorian, Edwardian or even Gothic façades and you've got little chance of knowing what you're in for.
This week's New York Times hotel report has nothing but good things to say about Hotel K, a food-lovers haven attached to the three-Michelin-star L'Arnsbourg in northeastern France.
Though Sarah Wildman's story is ostensibly about the hotel, she spends plenty of time discussing the real reason you'd stay the night: the food. Then again, when the food is some of the world's best, we can't blame her for talking it up:
All guests are encouraged to take the 25-euro breakfast. No one refuses. The night before diners create a wish list, obsessing over selections including interesting cheese plates, charcuterie, soft-boiled eggs, baskets of fresh pastries, baguettes and preserves, yogurts, omelets, the list goes on. In the morning [chef] Klein works the room, chatting in French and cutting Serrano ham on a mini-butcher's slicer.
Because the place is out in the country, you'll have plenty of space in which to loosen your belt. Good thing, too: After breakfast and before dinner, you'll want to have your way with the free minibar.
When a place gets real reviews like this one, it only makes us want to go more:
This place is simply wonderful and I cannot imagine how anyone could give it less than a top rating. I've been to other larger five-star properties but they cannot match the service this intimate little Inn can...the dinner is the highlight of the stay. It is the best meal I have ever had at a restaurant.
An as long as we're dreamin', we'll go ahead and imagine ourselves at the private addition, the Mayor's House: a couple of fireplaces, a courtyard garden and all the other amenities of the hotel, including a guaranteed seat in the dining room.
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by amandak
