Pick of the crop: 20 of the best country house hotels in England to suit all tastes

At Hambleton Hall in Rutland, the car park was full of ancient estate cars with dog blankets and muddy wellies on the back seats. At The Grove, near Watford, we would have needed an Aston Martin to turn heads in a car park full of Porsches. At Cowley Manor in Gloucestershire, I had trouble finding space among the Minis lined up for a promotional event. And at Babington House in Somerset, (pictured top, with Chewton Glen's pool) my boyfriend’s rusty old Rover was whisked away by staff without so much as a raised eyebrow. (Sadly, we got it back the next day.) You can tell a lot about a country house hotel, and its guests, by the parking arrangements. Nowhere was this clearer than at the Four Seasons Dogmersfield Park in Hampshire, which I have visited twice since it opened last year. The first time I was under cover. After my mixed review appeared in The Times, I was invited back to gauge progress.

Driving in through the estate’s uninspiring parkland, I was greeted by a top-hatted doorman, who told me that valet parking was £10. He asked my name, and on hearing it — he had clearly been briefed — insisted on parking my car for nothing. He was following instructions, but my first impressions were that service was by turns grasping and fawning. (The parking charge has since been dropped.) But Four Seasons, better known for its city and resort hotels, is not alone in capitalising on our new enthusiasm for country house hotel breaks. Recent openings — Whatley Manor, Cowley Manor, Barnsley House, The Grove — have been greeted by acres of newsprint about how the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, Liz Hurley, Zoë Ball and Fatboy Slim have embraced this new country living.

“Country house hotels go in generational waves,” said Victoria Mather, travel editor of Vanity Fair. “When I was 25, just being taken to one with your boyfriend was very exciting, but now it’s normal. So what they must have is decent food, probably organic; something to do, such as a spa — and real log fires.”

But with rooms often costing £300 a night without meals, are the new country house hotels simply a licence to print money? To see how it has traditionally been done, I started with a couple of classics.

Hambleton Hall, originally a Victorian hunting lodge, is the sort of country house hotel that is as remarkable for what it does not have — no spa, crèche or screening room — as for what it has, which includes views over Rutland Water, beautiful gardens and a Michelin-starred chef. Sipping tea on the terrace outside my cottage, the Croquet Pavilion, all I could hear were church bells, cooing doves and lapping water.

My bedroom offered a comfortable four-poster with french windows facing the garden, a rolltop bath, Penhaligon smellies and the sort of detail that so many hotels get wrong: coat hooks and light switches where I needed them, and taps and plugs that I did not need an engineering degree to operate.

Over dinner I asked the owner, Tim Hart, how he keeps standards high. As ever, it’s about people. “If you have uneven numbers of guests through the week, it’s hard to get the staffing, and therefore the service right,” he said, mentioning rival hotels that have large functions at weekends but are quiet midweek. “But we do a lot of lunches and have similar numbers of visitors all week. And the staffing situation has improved with EU enlargement, as we have lots of high-calibre Poles.”

Funnily enough, at Chewton Glen in Hampshire, 70 per cent of the housekeeping staff are Polish, as are many kitchen porters. Chewton, with 58 rooms and a large spa and pool, is much bigger than 15-room Hambleton, but attracts a similar crowd: those who love traditional, slightly chintzy but supremely comfortable rooms, classic menus, walks and golf.

“It’s not stuck in a timewarp,” said Andrew Stembridge, the managing director, as he showed me around. The hair salon has been replaced by a grooming lounge; rooms have Bang & Olufsen stereos and wi-fi. And service was seamless: at breakfast, tea and toast arrived almost as soon as I’d asked for them.

Chewton Glen has been owned and run by Martin Skan since he opened it in 1966; Hart opened Hambleton in 1980. Adam Raphael, the co- author of the Good Hotel Guide, said: “Both hotels are controlled by people who have spent their lives doing it. And it does require that. These hotels are difficult to run at this level.” He puts Raymond Blanc, chef-patron at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire, in the same category.

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