The Idle Rocks

We’ve always liked the St Mawes Hotel, with its fabulous location right in the heart of this pretty and rather fashionable Cornish fishing village, but we love its sister hotel The Idle Rocks just as much. It's also housed in a beautiful Edwardian waterfront building in the centre of the village, and is a stylish, bright and contemporary place that has a touch of escapism and seaside romance about it. It was voted one of the best 50 beach hotels in Europe by the readers of Sunday Times Travel Magazine a couple of years ago – quite an accolade, given the competition, but once you get here you will see why: not only are the building and the location pretty much picture-postcard-perfect, but the stripped-down charm of the guest rooms and the unabashed comfort of the public areas make it the perfect place to spend the weekend doing, well, not very much at all. There are 19 individually designed bedrooms, ranging from cosy Village rooms to spacious Sea View Rooms, plus a restaurant which serves superb local produce in a deliberately non-starchy, laid-back and really rather Cornish environment – and which itself has also won various awards, not least in The Times, which rightly ranked it among the UK's top places to eat by the sea.