For a break from the traditional, try a modern hotel where you’re more likely to encounter abstract art, tablet-based technology and infinity pools than tea and coffee-making facilities or trouser presses. From cutting-edge architecture to pioneering standards of sustainability, these nine modern UK hotels blend state-of-the-art facilities with the sort of hospitality that never goes out of fashion.
Modern hotels
The Zetter - The 'Long Weekender' Special Offer
London
A design-led boutique hotel with impressive green credentials (it pumps water from its own 1,500-foot borehole), this former Victorian warehouse embodies the renaissance of East London.
The Scarlet - Complimentary Wine Flight Special Offer
Mawgan Porth
Shhh! It’s adults only at this ‘truly special’ cliff-top hotel, which, say readers this year, ‘achieves a wonderful balance of chic luxury, tranquillity and culinary delight’.
St Brides Spa Hotel
Saundersfoot
‘An example of what a British seaside hotel can do.’ Trusted readers were impressed by Lindsey and Andrew Evans’s coastal property, created with an ‘ambition, vision and style one might associate with California or Australia’.
Brocco on the Park
Sheffield
‘A beacon of how to do things properly: metropolitan style with Yorkshire substance.’ Generous praise from a regular reader this year for this ‘smart, sophisticated' hotel on the edge of Sheffield’s student quarter.
Tigh an Dochais
Broadford Isle of Skye
Across a galvanised footbridge, the huge windows of Neil Hope and Lesley Unwin’s modern, architect-designed B&B bring those ‘glorious views’ of Broadford Bay and the Cuillin mountains right into the house.
Kaywana Hall
Kingswear
Across the estuary from Dartmouth, in its own hillside woodland, Tony Pithers and Gordon Craig’s ultra-modern 1960s Butterfly house (one of four like it in Devon) has a curving staircase, angled zinc roof and glass walls.
Tebay Services Hotel
Penrith
‘How wonderful it would be if many service areas (and indeed motorway hotels) could be like this one.’
CitizenM Bankside
London
Style-conscious, budget-friendly and well located – a winning combination for this ‘excellent-value’ hotel within easy reach of London’s financial and cultural quarters.
Cathedral 73
Cardiff
Royal treatment awaits visitors to this stylishly refurbished Victorian town house hotel; a butler, personal chef and chauffeur-driven vintage Rolls-Royce are at the ready, if required.