Chicest Pubs With Rooms in the UK

The Bull, Charlbury

Charlbury, Oxfordshire, England

The Public House Group, the team behind London’s beloved Pelican in Notting Hill and the Hero in Maida Vale, have taken their pared-back, seriously cool approach to the Cotswolds, and the result is The Bull in Charlbury, a village pub with a quietly devoted following among those who know. Stripped back, confident, and completely free of the fussy country-house aesthetics that characterise too many Cotswolds conversions, The Bull is the pub the Good Food Guide describes as “fast becoming the last word in pared-back cool contemporary British pubs”. The kitchen keeps things seasonal and sharply executed; Sunday roasts that draw people from across the county, daily specials built around what’s good right now. Accommodation is understated and tasteful: clean lines, good mattresses, no unnecessary embellishment. It is the kind of pub that makes you feel like you’ve found something genuinely special without anyone having told you to find it, which, of course, is exactly the point.

The Gunton Arms

Thorpe Market, Norfolk, England

There is nothing quite like The Gunton Arms anywhere in Britain. Set within a thousand-acre deer park near the North Norfolk coast, this is a pub owned by an art dealer and it looks exactly like that sounds. Works by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud and Paula Rego hang in a maze of low-lit rooms, juxtaposed with flagstone floors, a pool table, and a roaring fire where actual locals drink actual pints. In the Elk Room, chef Stuart Tattersall, formerly of Mark Hix, cooks steaks and estate venison over an enormous open fire beneath a fossilised elk skull the size of a small car. The sixteen bedrooms, designed by the celebrated Robert Kime, have a magnificent granny-chic eccentricity: printed wallpapers, antique dark wood, roll-top baths sourced from derelict Alexandrian mansions, and views across the deer park from every window. It has held a Michelin Bib Gourmand for thirteen consecutive years and was named East of England Pub of the Year at the 2025 National Pub and Bar Awards. That it still feels like a proper local, pool table, darts, thirsty gamekeepers, is its most extraordinary achievement.

The Beckford Arms

Fonthill Gifford, Tisbury, Wiltshire
The ivy-covered Beckford Arms sits at the edge of the Fonthill Estate in south Wiltshire, the same estate where Fonthill Lake glistens in the valley below and where Byron, Nelson and Turner once came as guests. It has been run since 2011 by the team behind The Talbot Inn and The Bath Arms, a group with an unerring eye for what a properly lovely pub with rooms should look like: Farrow & Ball walls, seagrass carpets, Egyptian cotton sheets, Siberian goosedown duvets. Eight bedrooms inside the inn are simple but exactly right – everything chosen with care. Two secluded lodges are hidden in the grounds a short stroll from the front door, each with a mezzanine bedroom and roll-top bath gazing out over the most beautiful views in Wiltshire. And for something more theatrical still, The Arch, the Grade I-listed gatehouse to the estate, can be booked in its entirety, with its spiral stone staircase, wood-burning stove, kitchen, and top-floor bunk room. Food is properly seasonal: whole Poole Bay plaice, Wiltshire lamb rump with green sauce, suckling pig spit-roasting on the bar’s open fire. Come summer, the duck-egg blue front door opens onto the garden and the Fonthill Estate walks begin immediately from there.

THE INN AT WHITEWELL

Whitewell, Forest of Bowland, Lancashire
There is a moment, driving through the Trough of Bowland towards Whitewell, when most visitors understand they have found something rare. The landscape unfolds into moorland and then the river, and then the Inn eventually appears high on the banks of the Hodder, as if it has been here forever because it has, since at least the fourteenth century. Now run by Charles Bowman, the third generation of his family to be at the helm, it doubles as a wine merchant: Forest Bowland Vintners operates from the front-of-house, with over two hundred bottles, including wines from smaller growers most guests have never encountered, available to take away with dinner. The twenty-five bedrooms are all different. Rich, colourful textiles, think Nina Campbell, Mulberry, Benisson, Colefax and Fowler, give each room a warmth and personality that chain hotels spend decades and millions trying to approximate and never quite manage. Fourteen have open fires; several have Victorian or Edwardian cabinet baths of magnificent proportions. The walls are hung with antiques, hunting prints and original art chosen with real passion and knowledge. Downstairs, stone-flagged floors, groaning bookshelves and real ales from the area complete a picture that Hardens has called “a great escape” and the Good Food Guide simply describes as one of the most beautiful places in England. Head chef Jamie Cadman has been at the stoves for close to thirty years. Order the fish pie. Book a room with a peat fire and a river view — this is exactly what they were made for.

THE GURNARD’S HEAD

Treen, near Zennor, Cornwall
The Gurnard’s Head is unmistakable on the headland: mustard-yellow exterior, its name painted on the roof in letters you can read from the coastal path, surrounded by gorse and grassland and the low thunder of the Atlantic. It belongs to Charles and Edmund Inkin, the brothers who also run the Felin Fach Griffin in Wales and the Old Coastguard in Mousehole – a trio of inns that have quietly become the gold standard for what this kind of place can be. The philosophy is the same across all three: good local food, no televisions, Roberts radios, Welsh blankets, fresh flowers, and a bar that is genuinely, warmly open to everyone who walks through the door. Inside, the Gurnard’s Head is cosy in the most serious sense of the word, open fires at both ends of the bar, logs stacked in an alcove, maps and art on the walls, books on every shelf (take one home if you don’t finish it; post it back when you do). Seven bedrooms face the moors or the ocean, each furnished with the same instinct for unshowy comfort: luxurious beds, Bramley toiletries, rooms kept deliberately free of the things you didn’t come to Cornwall to look at. Room 8, the largest, has its own log-burning stove and a private terrace, and is worth booking months in advance. The menu changes daily according to what’s landed and what’s seasonal; the Good Food Guide is consistently enthusiastic. There is no mobile signal to speak of. That, for most people who know this place, is a large part of the point.

THE QUEEN’S ARMS

Corton Denham, Somerset/Dorset border
The Queen’s Arms is the sort of pub that makes you feel relieved it still exists. A late eighteenth-century honey-hamstone inn in the tiny village of Corton Denham, right on the Somerset-Dorset border, it is run by Doune Mackenzie-Francis, who trained at Ballymaloe and worked in marketing at Leiths, with a seriousness of intent that shows in everything from the kitchen to the fabric choices upstairs. The bar is exactly as it should be: flagstone floors, mismatched tables, open fires, muddy boots and dogs entirely welcome. The suntrap terrace at the back looks out over the Corton ridge and the Somerset levels stretching into the distance, and on a clear evening it is one of the finest pub views in England. Head chef Richard Townsend, a Food Lifestyle Awards Chef of the Year finalist, runs a kitchen where almost everything is made from scratch and menus turn with the seasons and the local larder. The inn holds two AA Rosettes and a five-star AA rating. The five bedrooms have been individually designed to a proper standard — one is sumptuously papered in Colefax and Fowler, another has a freestanding bath with triple-aspect views towards Parrock Hill — and the breakfast that follows is a serious affair of homemade sausages, Old Spot bacon, freshly laid eggs and good strong coffee. Sherborne, one of the most beautiful market towns in the south of England, is ten minutes away. Cadbury Castle, the Monarch’s Way, and miles of empty walking country are on the doorstep.

THE MASONS ARMS

Branscombe, Devon, England
Branscombe is the sort of village that looks like it was arranged by a set designer: thatched cottages, narrow lanes, a lush valley descending gently to a pebble beach, and the Jurassic Coast stretching away in both directions. The Masons Arms sits at the heart of it, and has done since 1350 — originally a cider house, then named after the stonemasons who drank here while cutting the stone for Exeter Cathedral. The thatched roof, the low beamed ceilings, the pine cladding and whitewashed walls, the huge roaring log fire: none of it is an affectation. This is simply what the place has always looked like, and the twenty-eight rooms — spread across the inn itself and a collection of converted cottages and annexes in the grounds — have been designed to complement it rather than contradict it. The Branscombe Suites, in particular, are full of what Sawday’s calls “lots of luxury touches,” and the attention to detail throughout is consistently remarked upon by guests who expected rather less. The kitchen celebrates the South West without trying to be clever about it: locally sourced ingredients, refined pub classics, good wine, and ales from St Austell Brewery, which has owned the Masons Arms since 2009 and whose commitment to hospitality has produced a string of industry awards including Best Accommodation Operator at the 2024 Publican Awards. The beach is a ten-minute stroll. The South West Coast Path passes nearby. The Jurassic Coast, in summer, is one of the finest stretches of England. This is the kind of place you book for a weekend and quietly extend to a week.

THE WOODCOTE

Graffham, South Downs National Park, West Sussex
Deep in the lanes of the South Downs National Park, in the tiny village of Graffham, lies a thoughtfully restored country estate with six bedrooms and a restaurant at its heart, it sits in rolling West Sussex countryside with views of the Downs from most of the rooms and on a clear summer evening, there is very little in southern England to beat it. The bedrooms have been designed by Interior Designer, Anna Hewitson, with a care and distinctiveness that is immediately apparent: each has its own colour palette and character, with names drawn from the local landscape. Wiblings is botanical and romantic; Tays has an ochre, terracotta and sage palette with its own private terrace; Fitzlea is painted panelling and navy blues; Brooks is the softest greens and handmade furnishings with a secluded terrace. All come with Wildsmith toiletries, Roberts radios, Nespresso machines and the kind of properly considered detail, the right books, the right art, the right light, that distinguishes a room that has been thought about from one that has simply been furnished. The restaurant is headed by Michelin-starred chef Matt Gillan, formerly of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and Midsummer House, whose hyper-seasonal menus draw on local gamekeepers, farms, fisheries and foragers. The Times called the menu “stuffed with temptation.” On the evidence of guest reviews, that seems right. The South Downs Way runs close by; Petworth House, Goodwood and Cowdray are all within easy reach.