THE incognito inspector from The Sunday Times couldn’t have been more fulsome in his praise. One of the ten finalists in the Excellence for England awards, Holly Lodge in Thursford Green, north Norfolk, is a “showcase for how all B&Bs might be,” he enthused.
His report went further. The bed had “obviously been teleported into Norfolk from the boudoir of an emperor’s concubine,” he remarked, a four-poster buried beneath pillows and cushions and swathed in richly coloured fabrics. “The rest of the room was pretty lush, too, with wine-red walls, a leather sofa, a classical bust — even a wire slipper filled with chocolate mints.”
It was the second consecutive year of success for north Norfolk. Last year, Field House in Hindringham won the title in the VisitBritain awards, a B&B just five miles from Holly House – and another that won top marks from last year’s ST inspector but for quite different reasons.
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While the extravagant interior design of Holly Lodge (from £40 per person) helped owners Robert Greenfield and Michael Bell to the award, the success of Field House (doubles £80-£100, singles £65-£70) was largely due to traditional virtues of service.
Back to the ST reporter: “Wendy Dolton is the driving force, and there’s something of the alchemist about her, because she’s conjured gold-standard accommodation from the base metal of a run-of-the-mill, suburban-style house. “She runs it with a restless perfectionism, filling her rooms with the kind of mod cons you’d expect to find in boutique hotels, and maintaining them in spotless condition.”
My, my. Are we talking British B&Bs here? Such praise of accommodation in Britain has been confined in the past decade to the emergence of boutique hotels in Brighton and London or the Michelin-starred restaurant hotels of North Yorkshire.
The Malmaison and Hotel du Vin chains accelerated the trend of good regional hotels. Both are a decade old and have been copied copiously by hoteliers the length and breadth of the country.
During the period, B&Bs in regional Britain were largely the preserve of the late booker, budget tourist or the unfortunate with no alternative. Only last week I had a family wedding in a nondescript Somerset town. The B&B owner was perfectly hospitable and our bedroom, with its collection of lead farmyard animals, amusing and comfortable – but the bathroom was a corner of the room, his bacon inedible and, sadly, his body odour overwhelming...
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Yet a sea change is under way that has seen B&Bs come out of the bedroom, thanks to a series of events. The ongoing renaissance of the English seaside (North Norfolk being a prime example) coincided with the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, which devastated rural tourism in large parts of the country. It forced many farmstay and B&B operators to upgrade their products in order to compete when the countryside re-opened, with a genuine welcome and attention to detail the new order.
Perhaps as important, there has been an exodus of money from London as entrepreneurs cashed in on the property boom and moved out, seeking new projects and challenges – and finding dilapidated, run-down or cash-poor B&Bs from Devon to The Wash and on to Northumbria.
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On researching a Pub of the Year project for The Times in 2000, I stayed in The Village Pub in Barnsley, Gloucestershire (doubles from £80-£125). The gay London couple had that year completely renovated the old inn, laying seagrass carpeting in the four rooms, supplying fresh milk for morning tea in the room and superb food in the restaurant.
And while many locals were disgruntled with the prices and design, at least their village pub had been saved from certain closure. I have since seen similar restorations of old pubs or B&Bs in Dorset, East Sussex and in the Brecon Beacons, with the common factor usually being a couple who wanted a fresh challenge and saw ways to attract visitors through style, informality and good food.
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Often, B&Bs will now offer dinner as an option. As a result of the tangible new mood, the hotel reviews of The Times have expanded to embrace B&Bs as the gap between perceptions of the two narrows.
Last month, Tan-Yr-Allt (doubles from £75-£95), a new B&B in Porthmadog in North Wales, opened to a rave review from the paper’s paid-for reporter. “That night’s menu was bruschetta, stuffed quail, vegetables, chocolate mousse and cheeses. I felt as if I were at a dinner party; conversational topics included how to eat a primrose and the merits or otherwise of the Prime Minister. It is a wonderfully social way to dine.”
Another factor in the rapidly improving standards is technology. Flatscreen televisions, DVDs and CDs in the room (with a choice available from the host) and broadband internet connections are becoming a must-have (or at least, ooh, I fancy that) features.
Only this week I heard of a new B&B in Blackpool, Number One, where the six rooms offer 42in plasma TVs, DVDs, CDs and Sony Playstations (doubles from £100, singles from £65). And technology is also helping B&Bs showcase themselves – a few photos of the rooms on a website does wonders for business.
VisitEngland’s award for tourism website of the year 2005 went to a Shropshire B&B, Lyth Hill House, which allows the user to download PDFs on the rooms: the B&B now gets 75 per cent of its bookings from the internet (doubles from £76-£100, singles from £44).
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But the best features of a B&B remain deceptively simple. Fresh white cotton sheets, fresh orange juice, flowers and fresh milk in the room and go so far in attracting word of mouth bookings and repeat business.
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It’s the small things that really do matter. A Times reviewer at the Durrant House Hotel (doubles from £75-98) in Rye, East Sussex, noted the fresh flowers at reception and that the books in the bedrooms and residents’ lounge were “literature, not potboilers”. The eggs were also “so wondrously large and orange-yolked” that a visiting American chicken farmer wanted to know the type of hens that laid them.
At One3Two in York (doubles from £55-£80), the new five-bedroomed B&B not only has DVDs and widescreen TVs, four-posters or antique French beds with Egyptian linen – but it also offers breakfast hampers with champagne, juice, bacon quiche and waffles in bed. I want to stay there.
And do you know another common theme to all the B&Bs I’ve mentioned here? It’s that prices for all of them start at £100 or under for double occupancy. To be fair, Malmaison’s rates currently start at £99 – and if you’re staying a night in one of the seven cities in which the company operates, it’s a good choice. But even Malmaison doesn’t run to in-room literature, breakfast hampers or wire slippers filled with chocolate mints. Good B&Bs can now be found across the country, however.
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As if to underline the trend, a new collection of top-notch inns was lauched at the end of June. Distinctive Country Inns is a collection of 40 inns in southern England, many of which feature CD and DVD players, plasma screens and other contemporary touches.
As the Sunday Times reviewer said, having just completed a gut-busting tour of this year’s ten B&B finalists in the VisitBritain awards: “There are no duds here, and four of them are eye-poppingly good. How good? Well, let me put it this way. “If this trend continues, there will soon be no need for luxury hotels. Designed with flair and confidence, run with painstaking attention to detail and offering the kind of sociable welcome that no hotel could ever match, they are a joy to stay in.” Beat that.
Read the Sunday Times article on the ten best B&Bs in England