With their background in TV and film, Sara Curran and Peter Sussman are experts in presentation. Since taking over in April 2022, they have hung artworks collected on their travels, refreshed the beautiful interiors, and added a Michelin-recommended brasserie to their 'exceptional hotel'.

Babe of the litter, this little piggy occupies a crenellated Georgian house and former pub built into the medieval city wall, with an artful granny's attic aesthetic, just a dozen bedrooms, and a deli using produce from the kitchen garden at the mother Pig at Brockenhurst in the New Forest.

Step inside a red-brick corner house in a yachting town on the edge of the New Forest, to find an idiosyncratic B&B, imbued with the generosity and personality of Tobias Feikle, perfect host and breakfast chef extraordinaire.

The actor Colin Firth is a fan of 'the hospitality, the food, the comfort of the rooms', not to mention the location at this sprawling, cliff-top Edwardian house.

Surrounded by Rylestone Gardens, with its tearooms and bandstand, Carole and Mike Hailston's cottage-orné-style Victorian residence with Tudor and Gothic elements is presented in traditional style, with period furnishings, and a breakfast cooked by the enthusiastic host.

With the sea to the fore and Tennyson Down rising up behind, this hotel has spectacular views and scarcely less impressive cooking in the revamped restaurant.

Pigs have foraged in the New Forest since the Norman Conquest, but a different breed arrived in 2011, when Robin Hutson took on a Georgian hunting lodge and reinvented the English country-house hotel, with a shabby-chic style mixing designer wallpapers and boot-sale finds in characterful house rooms and hideaway suites. Seasonal menus feature produce from the bountiful kitchen garden.

A turreted Victorian summer villa, this B&B with the feel of a luxury hotel is praised by our inspector for its attention to detail and smart, generously supplied bedrooms.