‘Behind the dramatic facade lies a beautiful garden,’ writes a reader in praise of this hotel and spa with its green oasis at the centre of a divine Georgian crescent.

Standing right on the quay overlooking estuary and salt marshes, in a coastal village of flint cottages, gift shops and galleries, Emma Stannard’s hotel is ideal for outdoorsy family holidays.

In ‘lovely Cotswold stone buildings around a pretty courtyard’, this mostly 16th-century former coaching inn has had a stylish make-over.

‘The surrounds are dramatic, the interiors pretty spectacular too.’ Readers report much to enjoy at Robert Dorrien-Smith’s gloriously isolated island hotel.

Cocooned in ‘lovely, peaceful grounds in glorious countryside’, Jean-Pierre Mifsud’s ‘welcoming’ Victorian country house hotel continues to offer an enjoyable bucolic break.

‘They just keep making it better every year,’ writes a trusted correspondent, of this luxurious country house hotel in Lakeland countryside.

Scottish Baronial meets Italian Renaissance in Samantha Leslie’s Victorian pile on one of the last great Irish castle estates still owned by the founding family.

Once used to billet D-Day troops, this revamped early 17th-century mansion now hosts ‘young children, exhausted parents’ and grandparents.

A Victorian baroque showstopper, this manor house stands on a steep hill in gardens above the Fowey estuary. It is part of the Luxury Family Hotels group.

Mellow sandstone battlements, turrets and towers are revealed only at the final turn of the ‘lengthy’ drive through the ‘vibrant, meticulously tended’ grounds of Paul and Poppy Szkiler’s 19th-century baronial pile.

Built in 1832, as Ventnor burgeoned from fishing hamlet to resort for health tourists, the Fisher Hotel became ‘royal’ thanks to the patronage of Queen Victoria.

A shooting lodge in the New Forest is home to the mother Pig, the first of Robin Hutson’s small but growing chain of family-friendly Pig hotels (see index).

Blond sofas, fluted pillars, chandeliers, paintings, oriental rugs, gilded mirrors… Opulence abounds in this bay-fronted Victorian former gentleman’s residence on the prom.

On the edge of Dartmoor National Park, with views to granite Haytor, the Hassell family’s hotel is ‘a little off the beaten tracks – but worth finding’.

‘At night, surrounded by floodlit cedars and oaks, it felt like a movie set,’ writes one reader this year, after visiting the luxury New Forest retreat.

You know where you are with a Pig. The style set by Robin Hutson at Brockenhurst (see entry) is brilliantly carried off at this Georgian manor house.

Developments are afoot at this hotel, centred on a Georgian coach house, ‘in a glorious setting on a huge estate with beautiful walled garden’.

‘A beautiful location, lovely gardens, good food and friendly service – and a view from our room that was probably the best we have ever enjoyed.’

‘There are chandeliers all over’ at Christa and Ian Taylor’s latest addition to the Bath hotel scene – the old Carfax, run formerly by the Salvation Army, now spiffed up to the nines, with the addition of a small spa.

Bird’s-eye views of the Lizard peninsula, little luxuries and an easy air turn this clifftop hotel into a stress-busting retreat.

‘Such a treat’. Wrapped by ‘gorgeous’ grounds, this revitalised 18th-century luxury hotel and amenity-packed spa girds the eastern Cotswolds.

A Victorian pile almost as impressive as the Atlantic swell outside, the Armstrong family’s child- and dog-friendly hotel overlooks one of the best surfing spots in Cornwall.

A country retreat just outside St Albans occupies an extended 300-year-old manor house, once the home of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

‘Beautifully located’ on the South West Coastal Path, this former Edwardian gentleman’s retreat has clifftop views of the three-mile-long beach.