The hotel: blink and you’ll miss the turning for Sonning. It’s a quick
nip along the M4, so close to London that you feel you’ve barely left the
congestion-charge zone. And yet The French Horn feels a zillion miles away.
Emphasis on the zzzzzzz. It’s one of those sleepy, rambling houses right
beside the Thames, all ivy and small-pane windows, saved from a dunking by a
sweeping lawn, weeping willows and immaculately clipped hedges. This is Wind
in the Willows country, and the hotel’s mantle of tranquillity is penetrated
only by the toot-toot of the busyish road past the door.
The hotel has been here for more than 200 years, and for the past 35 has been
in the custody of the Emmanuels, who seem to have spent most of that time
polishing their welcome. It feels properly family-run.
The rooms: there are 13 in the main house, plus eight riverside
cottages, all but a couple overlooking pootling cruisers and gliding swans.
Decorwise, it’s fair to say the boutique revolution hasn’t arrived here. The
rooms are traditional, going on flouncy: lots of lemons and pinks and
elaborate drapery. But that is not necessarily a bad thing: it fits the
setting, and cleanliness and comfort are in good order.
We had a cottage and found it a charming place to hunker down. We didn’t even
need to go to the main house for breakfast: it is cooked in an annexe behind
your digs and paraded in, piping hot, with the morning newspaper. We ate by
the fire in our sitting room and watched the ducks dabbling outside the
window.
The food: surely it can’t be the same little quackers spit-roasting
over the drawing-room fire? The canard rôti à l’Anglaise
is the signature dish on a menu heavily flavoured with French classics. The
proprietor, Michael Emmanuel, trained at the Moulin de Mougins under Roger
Vergé, and it shows.
The hotel styles itself as a “restaurant with rooms”, and the food is fancily
presented, plentiful and pricey — £25plus for a main course. It’s good,
though, and the build-up by that fireplace really gets your juices flowing.
The drawing room looks like the interior of a Norman castle, and you feel
every inch the visiting lord as Emmanuel helps you to a leather armchair and
a glass of chilled champagne. Get there early so you’ve time to read his
wine list: he’s a third-generation vintner, and it is a paean to fine French
vintages.
In need of exercise? Stroll to the Mill at Sonning, an 18th-century
flour mill that has been converted into a dinner theatre; the hotel staff
are forearmed with directions. If weather permits, go on to Henley, where
Edwardian England never quite died. The River and Rowing Museum (£3.50;
01491 415600) traces the story of the sport all the way from an Athenian
trireme to the Athens Olympics.
Who will like it? Foodies of all dimensions; but especially frazzled
townies who don’t want to waste time stuck in transit on the way to their
riparian idyll.
Who won’t? Duck-lovers and style gods.
The French Horn, Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire (0118 969 2204, www.thefrenchhorn.co.uk).
Double rooms from £160, B&B (£170 with river view); cottages from
£215, B&B; two-course set dinner menu, £29.50; three courses, £39
