This English country-house hotel is the ultimate romantic stay
Oh, England. If you need to fall in love with your country again, if you need a treat, if you want to be transported back to the romantic era, then come and stay at the Cavendish Hotel. Arrive in time for cocktails on the new terrace with its red-and-white striped umbrellas, and drink in the Peak District view laid out before you. Admire them again from your bedroom window when you wake in the misty morning. After a perfect English breakfast, stroll through the kissing gate across stately Capability Brown parkland dotted with sheep and caramel-coloured Limousin cattle, and you are soon at the great house of Chatsworth, its façade resplendent with gleaming scrubbed sandstone, gilded windows and carvings.
I’ve always loved the Cavendish for the same reason that I love all my favourite country hotels: it has a wonderful setting and it makes a perfect base for relaxation and exploration. For years it was run on a leasehold, and then a management contract by old-school hotelier Eric Marsh together with managing director Philip Joseph. Now Marsh has retired, and with Joseph still at the helm, it’s been taken back by its owner, the Duke of Devonshire (the sixth Duke is said to have won the original inn from the Duke of Rutland at cards in 1830). It’s one of five hotels and inns on the Devonshire estates.
The Countess of Burlington, the wife of the heir to the dukedom, the Earl of Burlington, has worked closely with interior designer Nicola Harding to create a heavenly place to stay without a jarring note, filled with artworks. Harding designed parts of Beaverbrook in Surrey, and the Cavendish, too, is typical of her gentle, comforting take on English country-house style. The look employs patterned wallpapers from Pierre Frey, café curtains and long velvet ones on iron rods, Rosi de Ruig paper lampshades, and a colour palette from soft greens to eclectic pinks. The art includes modern pieces bought by the Countess and her husband and older ones – prints, paintings, photographs – sourced from Chatsworth House. In the 1950s-style bar there are family photographs and also ones by Jorge Lewinski, who taught Lord Burlington, himself a professional photographer.
The current Duke and his son’s love of modern ceramics – evident as you tour the great house – is reflected in the pieces on the shelves behind reception by Australian maker Pippin Drysdale, which are also in the Painted Hall at Chatsworth. These and the artworks, in addition to the well-thumbed books in the lounge and rooms (Chatsworth has 40,000 antique books), help to create a much closer connection between “the house”, as it is known locally, and the hotel. The same can be said for the plants grown in the Chatsworth glasshouses; the lamps in the restaurant fashioned from old fire hoses that Harding found rummaging through the Chatsworth attic; and the Garden Room tables crafted from the same Derbyshire fossil limestone used at the house.
There are 28 rooms behind smart green-baize doors. They are mostly found by winding through narrow corridors and along a lovely conservatory-style passage hung with botanical prints that connects the old coaching inn with its modern wing. Rooms are generally not large, and in mine it was hard to find anywhere to put wash bags in the pretty bathroom. But they are all attractive (mine set off by a canary-yellow abstract painting) and not too ambitiously priced, some with four posters whose new mattresses are so thick that steps are required to get up onto the bed. The Cavendish stands on a busy road, but you would never know it; almost all the rooms have views of the surrounding countryside behind the hotel.
There are two restaurants, both an absolute pleasure to dine in. The Garden Room, filled with natural light, serves soups, salads and sandwiches as well as more substantial dishes, while the more ambitious menu in Gallery Restaurant is largely worthy of the effort. We ate trout from local Ladybower Fisheries, pork from family-run Moss Valley Fine Meats, and a delicious strawberry soufflé. As well as a couple of arresting old family portraits, there are some lovely paintings and drawings of the surrounding landscape in this elegant dining room.
But of all the changes at the Cavendish, it’s the addition of the Terrace, where the Garden Room menu is also served, that has transformed a traditional inn into something more Mediterranean than English, and brought the whole place alive. To walk from there to Chatsworth, where private tours can be arranged all year round, is the very essence of what staying in an English country-house hotel is all about.
Doubles from £200, including breakfast
The Cavendish Hotel, Church Lane, Baslow, Bakewell DE45 1SP (01246 582311)
