Dumbleton Hall

Room very comfortable and peaceful. Staff were kind, friendly and very professional. Restaurant, staff and food excellent.

Excellent location, amazing building and lovely estate -really photogenic! Staff very friendly and helpful. Sleep comfort good (mattress, pillows). Suite fine: spacious, well lit, great views outside. Basic rooms not so much. Decent value for money.

Breakfast and restaurant food: lots of room for improvement there in all respects. Cars shouldn't be allowed to park at the facade of the hotel. Some renovation of the interiors would benefit the place -common spaces mostly ok, the rooms more in need, especially as regards furniture.

As you drive past the village cricket ground and catch your first sight of Dumbleton Hall, you know you have arrived. A true country house hotel, with a rich and colourful past, situated in picturesque grounds. My room had a wonderful vista of the croquet lawn and the wooded hillside beyond. I stayed for 2 nights and enjoyed 2 nights of restful sleep. The bathroom was spacious, with excellent amenities. The public rooms are airy and comfortable, and one can easily imagine Audrey fforbes-Hamilton and Richard DeVere enjoying a secret tete a tete. Dumbleton Hall is expensive, reassuringly so, but money has clearly been invested in the building, and the quality of the fixtures and fittings. If the weather is favourable, enjoy the grounds, and if not, recline indoors, open your copy of The Field or Country Life, grab a G&T and enjoy. Visitors from overseas will imagine this was how England used to be. At Dumbleton Hall, it still is.

In the restaurant, I found the main courses somewhat fussy, but the desserts were superb. Breakfast progressed at a glacial pace, OK if you are staying in the hotel for the day, but inconvenient if you have business to attend to.

The location and setting were absolutely spectacular and we were blessed with wonderful weather during our stay. The bedroom was clean which is extremely important to us and the food was good. The real highlight however, was the chocolate cake, genuinely the best chocolate cake we have ever had and easily the most memorable part of our stay.

The biggest disappointment was the lack of attention to detail and the overall standard of service. The bedroom had no mirror, the shower was very small with nowhere to place toiletries and some communal areas needed more attention to cleanliness particularly the downstairs mirrors and inside of the windows. Service was extremely slow and there seemed to be a significant lack of staff. At one point there was nobody at the bar to serve us and on another occasion we had to walk around the property trying to find a member of staff. During dinner, we struggled repeatedly to get the attention of one of the waitresses and felt almost invisible. Oscar was the exception and worked incredibly hard but at breakfast he appeared to be managing everything on his own without adequate support. Checkout was also disappointing. The receptionist didn’t ask how our stay had been and came across as disengaged and uninterested. Overall, such a beautiful property has enormous potential but the staffing, service, cleanliness of communal areas and practical details need considerable improvement.