A coat of arms and portraits of past owners set the tone at this honey-hued former rectory, recommended by Guide readers for a ‘welcoming, comfortable, relaxing’ country house experience. The 17th-century building is a ‘lovely’ rambling hotel with a family crest above the porch, mullion windows, antiques, cosy fireplaces and ‘lots of nice touches – board games to play, wellies to borrow’. It is surrounded by several ‘beautiful’ gardens including a lawn, apparently custom-built for Pimm’s and croquet, a walled garden, a wild flower meadow. Inside the elegant dining room, with its beams and original art, chef Charles Smith’s ‘excellent’ seasonal menus might include hand-dived Orkney scallop, green asparagus, squid ink mousseline; fallow deer, buttered hispi cabbage, young beetroots, violet mustard. The ‘well-appointed’ bedrooms have ‘lots of drawers and hangers’; the largest have archetypal Cotswold views, bay windows, colonial four-poster. Management has recently been taken back in-house, although as a reader says: ‘Had we not asked, we’d not have known: service was confident and assured. We had a very good time, and hope to return.’ (Rosemary Melling, and others)