Strattons

Tucked away behind a shopping street in a market town, Vanessa and Les Scott’s dog-friendly, child-friendly hotel occupies a Palladian villa in gardens. Walk up a narrow lane and you will pass the hotel’s ‘happy, bustling’ deli, the place for all-day breakfast, cakes (including ‘rightly famous’ fishcakes with fennel slaw), quiches, tapas, rare breed and vegetarian sausage rolls. Each bedroom, in the main house and annexes, is one of a kind, with perhaps a cinema screen, a woodland mural on the walls, or a mermaid mosaic in the bathroom. Opium has a large bath at the foot of an oriental-style four-poster. The opulent dual-aspect Red Room includes a large lounge area, a Jacobean four-poster on a plinth, and access via its own courtyard garden. You might find resident cats snoozing in the lounge. In Afterfive restaurant, a spiffy, flint-walled barn conversion, ethically sourced, organic, artisan, home-grown and foraged produce appears on a seasonal menu of dishes devised by Vanessa. They might include seafood lasagne, wild mushroom risotto with carpaccio of beetroot, or rack of lamb with jus and Binham Blue bubble and squeak.