No. 1 Pery Square

A fire burns in the marble fireplace, while candles flicker beside ‘attractive’ collections of books in Patricia Roberts’s Georgian town house hotel overlooking the People’s Park. Guide inspectors in 2016 received ‘a cheerful greeting’. Gilt mirrors and ‘a variety of art’ hang on the walls; in the Park Room bar, sample light bites and a gin-and-tonic menu. Sash, the upstairs restaurant, is ‘a very pleasant environment in which we enjoyed watching the world below pass by’. Fred Duarte cooks traditional dishes with a twist, perhaps ‘tasty’ sage, apple and hazelnut soup; sautéed chicken, lavender- and honey-roasted carrots. At bedtime, lay your head in one of the four ‘elegant, spacious’ period rooms (two overlook the square), with ‘opulent’ furnishings and fine original features – it’s these, not the more ordinary Club Rooms (‘rather small, needing better lighting; slippers and bathrobes provided’) that ‘lift the place’. At breakfast: home-made granola, freshly squeezed orange juice ‘from tart oranges’, ‘unexceptional’ scrambled eggs. Not quite ready for the bustling city? Book an organic treatment or Irish seaweed bath in the vaulted basement spa.