Hotel wedding venues in Dorset

An ancient, honey-stone priest’s house turned hotel in a pretty market town has been given a chic make-over as a restaurant-with-rooms.

A Georgian dower house extended to designs by Thomas Hardy, this luxury hotel and spa (Relais & Châteaux) stands in landscaped grounds adjoining a deer park.

It’s one long round of fun at this family-friendly hotel, centred on a Georgian manor house overlooking Chesil Beach and the Fleet Lagoon.

With the shiny promise of a cruise ship, Robert Wilson and Tim Lloyd’s spa hotel by the River Stour is as family- and dog-friendly as you please.

A higgledy-piggledy 19th-century marine villa with a jumble of towers and gables gazes across Studland Bay to the chalk stacks of Old Harry Rocks.

Order a crab sandwich on the terrace, gaze out over Lyme Bay from this white-painted hotel above Chesil Beach, and you can half imagine you’re in Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod.

A ‘lovely’ walled garden gives a country house air to this small hotel in the heart of a historic market town.

Traces of the 17th century survive in this coaching inn-turned-hotel, rebuilt in the early 1800s by Earl Grosvenor.