Hotel Endsleigh

Endsleigh was built as a fishing and hunting lodge for the 6th Duke of Bedford, who laid the first stone in 1810 on a stretch of the Tamar Valley he thought the prettiest part of his estate. His wife Georgiana gave it a Scottish flavour, and Humphry Repton laid out the gardens in one of his last commissions. The house and its 108 acres of cascades, grottos, champion trees and a raised parterre are both Grade I listed. Olga Polizzi bought the estate in 2004 and opened it as a hotel of 21 bedrooms and suites the following year.

Inside, the rooms are classically English: a panelled dining room hung with the crests of the Bedford family, two drawing rooms with open fires, a well-stocked library, and the Duchess Lounge, dressed in its original hand-painted wallpaper and taken for private dinners of up to 16. Across the courtyard, the Stable seats 80 for dinner and holds 140 for dancing. All the ground-floor rooms of the house are licensed for ceremonies, as are the parterre and the Shell House, a small grotto set into the hillside and lined with shells and coral.

The fullest version of an event here is an exclusive-use weekend, with the house, the garden and the staff given over to one party. There is no traffic, no aircraft noise and no light pollution, and the hotel itself points out that it has no neighbours. It sits on the Devon side of the Cornish border, about three and a half hours from London by car.