The epitome of country-house luxury with gourmet dining, this former hunting box built for a wealthy brewer stands in beautifully landscaped gardens on a peninsula above Rutland Water. A Relais & Châteaux hotel, it has been owned and run since 1980 by Tim and Stefa Hart (see also Hart’s Hotel, Nottingham). 'Very comfortable and well-equipped bedrooms, quiet, lovely grounds, superb friendly and professional customer service and top-quality cuisine and wines,' a reader sums up. Interior designer Stefa creates the bedrooms. Each has its own style – maybe Nina Campbell fabrics, Toile de Jouy or Colefax and Fowler wallpaper, a half-tester bed. The adjacent two-bedroom, two-bathroom Croquet Suite has its own sitting room and breakfast room. In the fine-dining restaurant, holder of the UK’s longest-retained Michelin star, a sommelier can advise on wines to accompany chef Aaron Patterson’s creative menus of dishes such as fillet of wild turbot with sea vegetables and Cornish crab, radish, ginger and yuzu. 'They had me at the canapés,' reports a Guide insider. 'Every mouthful of every course was divine.' Readers agree about the ‘top-quality cuisine and wines’. Such spoiling comes at a price, of course, ‘but we never feel it's not worth it’. (Anthony Bradbury, Garth Pollard)