Widbrook Grange

‘Staying here was an experience,’ wrote Guide inspectors of Nick Dent’s Georgian farmhouse hotel, which is so dog-friendly it even hosts doggie birthday parties, and where creative reuse has been raised to an art form. A scrap-metal horse crops the grass. A sheep sports a spark-plug fleece. Within, even a bicycle has been upcycled as a washstand. The decor is ‘genuinely rustic, with wooden boxes piled up to form shelving … lots of interesting visual stimuli’. Yet there is nothing Steptoe here. House and annexe bedrooms have modern comforts, maybe an in-room roll-top bath, an emperor bed, ‘crisp bedlinens’, Bramley toiletries. There is a gin bar off ‘a clubby sitting room’, while in the restaurant gin features along with home-grown produce in many of Sandor Szucs’s dishes. For instance, ham-wrapped monkfish with a saffron gin sauce, or pear and mango cake, blackberry mousse, mulberry gin sorbet. A kids’ menu is mercifully free of mother’s 
ruin. Meanwhile, four-legged friends can tuck into sausages at breakfast, have afternoon tea, or 
hold a party, with optional bow ties and neckerchiefs along with a menu of cookies and cakes.