10 Decadent and Stylish Welsh Hotels to Make You Feel Like Prince for a Day

Built between 1849 and 1851 by Sir John Hay-Williams to fulfil his beloved wife’s fairy-tale dream of one day living in a Loire Valley chateau, the regal home was converted into a luxury hotel in 2012 and is composed of 27 bedrooms, as well as three cottage suites that occupy the extensive castle grounds.

Located along the Menai Strait, where the savage wilds of Snowdonia National Park trickle towards the mythical Isle of Anglesey, home of the “greatest castle that never was” in UNESCO-designated Beaumaris, Château Rhianfa boasts in addition to its gorgeous ersatz-Loire architecture and magical location an AA Rosette award restaurant, Le Dragon Rouge, where French and Welsh cuisine elide with unexpected yet unbeatable results.

Located in the sleepy Pembrokeshire fishing village of Penally, Penally Abbey Country House occupies the grounds of a 12th-century monastery whose sole vestiges can be found in the form of the ruined Norman chapel-cum-folly that now haunts the home’s lawned gardens. The hotel itself is located in a ‘Strawberry Gothic’ 18th-century rectory built from local Pembrokeshire limestone, eclectically yet stylish furnished with antique furniture, both local and French, and worn Persian rugs hand selected by owner and interior designer Melanie Boissevin.

Populated with 11 rooms, each having its own unique charm, and a boutique restaurant whose menu is curated according to the new bounties offered by the fertile Pembrokeshire coastline each season, its ever-changing tasting menus are particularly inspired, bringing the distinct yet abstract tastes of salt-stained ocean zephyrs and sun-brazed South Wales soils to life in tangible culinary form.

Located in an 1811 townhouse that was once the home and office of the local harbourmaster (hence the name!), the Harbourmaster Hotel is an independent boutique hotel located in idyllic Aberaeron. The Harbourmaster has been at the fore of the Aberaeron’s recent tourist renaissance, capitalising on the town’s prime location at the nexus of the babbling River Aeron and the scintillating Ceredigion Coast and the whimsical charm of the town’s harlequin Georgian architecture, of which the Harbourmaster is part and parcel.

The hotel offers 13 rooms spread across three historic harbour-front buildings: 7 original and cosily furnished rooms in the former Harbourmaster’s home, each with gorgeous sea-front or harbour views; four spacious rooms in a converted warehouse adjoining the main building; and a neighbouring self-catered cottage with two ensuite double bedrooms, a snug single room with harbour views, a kitchen, and a lounge area. On top of this, the Harbourmaster’s restaurant, headed by French-Welsh aficionado Ludo Dieumegard, has been featured previously in The Good Food Guide and offers the best of locally-caught seafood while offering views of the very fishing boats that caught them bobbing in the harbour. Talk about farm (or harbour) to table!

“If you weren’t looking for the Grove of Narberth, you might miss it.” Hidden deep among the Preseli Hills’ fecundant meadowland, the Grove of Narberth is a sumptuous 18th-century, Arts and Crafts country house located on 26 acres of patchwork lawn, wild field, and woodland. The main building - the handsome three-story Georgian home - contains within it 14 rooms, while 12 cottages dotted around the extensive grounds comprise the remainder of the Grove’s accommodation options.

The decor takes tangible (and welcomed) cues from William Morris, yet everywhere with a contemporary Welsh flair, miners’ lamps and quaint wood-burning stoves contributing a vernacular feel. This is accentuated in the food choices at the hotel’s two restaurants, both of which capitalise on the regional produce such as Welsh lamb and beef, Pembrokeshire-landed fish, and local artisan cheese, all garnished ingeniously with garden-grown herbs.

Nestled in the postcard Dee Valley on the cusps of Snowdonia, Palé Hall synthesises history, style, and sustainability to phenomenal ends. Located on 50 acres of private estate in a flamboyantly (but always fashionably) decorated Victorian manor home that whispers of Versailles, Queen Victoria and Sir Winston Churchill counts among its past guests, with the chic modern hotel is also notable as Wales’ first recipient of the Michelin Green Star in recognition of its resident restaurant’s exceptional environmentalism. It even has its own on-site hydroelectric plant to keep things carbon neutral.

The bright green grounds are themselves a playground that you could spend days roaming: wild woodland, dew-starred gardens, fishing ponds, and even a resident Shetland pony and donkey! The rooms, meanwhile, provide a stylishly fresh take on Victorian decadence that timelessly combine past and present: think William Morris wallpapers, antique oak furniture, and Arts and Crafts mirrors. Head chef Gareth Stevenson, meanwhile, serves up meals in the harp-serenaded dining hall truly worthy of the magisterial surroundings, alive with moreish regional flavours curated imaginatively, precisely, lovingly.

Sat on charming Pydew Mountain on 200 acres of sublime, award-winning garden, Bodysgallen Hall is a Grade I-listed, 17th-century National Trust property which comprises one of just three Historic House Hotels in the UK. Its hilltop perch gives its thirty-one rooms privileged views over Conwy, Snowdonia, Anglesey, the Great Orme, and Llandudno, while the decor, with its charismatic dark-oak panelling and vaulted stained-glass windows, gracefully heralds to an elysium bygone of decadent dinner parties and balls.

The grounds are a sort of reliquary in themselves. Climb the spiral-staircase, 13th-century stone tower that adjoins the Georgian country house, or the walled rose gardens and original 17th-century box-hedge parterre that claims to be one of the few of its type in the country. There is also the three AA Rosette-winning restaurant and the well-equipped spa, complete with a monumental 50ft indoor pool as well as a hot tub, steam room, sauna, and gym.

Located on the Teifi Wharf in the historic shipping town of Aberteifi (better known by its English name of Cardigan), Albion Aberteifi is, per its website’s claim, “designed to celebrate the town’s maritime heritage”, the former warehouse building’s original limewashed walls and 19th-century pencil sketches rescued from the site comprising just some of the hotel’s minimalistic contemporary decor, whose aesthetics fall somewhere between magazine-catalogue, Scandi cabin chic and the timeless chiaroscuro beauty of a Vermeer painting. It all echoes of the hotel’s past: the name ‘Albion’ pays homage to the ship that deposited the town’s original 27 settler families on Welsh shores from frigid New Brunswick, Canada back in April 1819.

The hotel restaurant, Yr Odyn, is named for the Welsh word for ‘Kiln’ and, like everything else at the Albion, is referential: “[the restaurant] takes its name from the remains of the 18th century lime kilns” that have been excavated along Cardigan’s wharfside, the site again recalls. The name reflects the restaurant’s ethos of fire and smoke, which serves Welsh produce fire-cooked and smoke-infused, the culinary techniques combining in-vogue Scandinavian and Japanese percipience.

Located on 600 acres of farm and perched merrily on a headland overlooking Saundersfoot Harbour and the cliff-backed coastline of Carmarthen Bay, St. Brides Spa Hotel is a multi-award winning luxury experience with one of the best locations in Pembrokeshire: seaside starlet Tenby is within reaching distance, as are a constellation of salt-perfumed, sand-soaked benches whose azure and white maritime hues seep into St. Brides’ decor like the scents and sounds of the beckoning ocean nearby.

Complete with 34 tastefully furnished rooms, each with seaside views and a balcony; a casual lounge bar; the romantic Cliff Restaurant; a fitness centre, sauna, and all the spa favourites, St. Brides’ standout attraction is by and far its thermally-heated infinity pool whose waters melt into Carmarthen Bay, its sleepy fishing boats transforming into ornamental trinkets bobbing on the pool surface. There is perhaps no better place in all of Pembrokeshire to just unwind.

Surrounded by the moonscape moors of Bannau Brycheiniog’s Black Mountains, Llangoed Hall is a truly historic hotel, its story beginning in 560AD, when Prince Iddon donated a castle on the site to the church to expatiate his sins. The contemporary structure is younger, built in 1632, but nonetheless has a rich past, including a 1912 Sir Clough Williams-Ellis redesign (known also for designing the eclectic toybox village of Portmeirion in North Wales) and ownership by the Laura Ashley dynasty, whose indelible tastes still saturate the building’s elegant and bespoke interior design.

The beautiful hotel is a sort of living museum, decorated with paintings by Whistler, Sickert, and Augustus John to name a few, as well as the first garment ever made by Laura Ashley. The restaurant, meanwhile, is one of the finest in the country, being routinely ranked among the best in the country. Its premier attraction, the afternoon tea, is a culinary-visual ode to Ashley, served on specially-made butterfly and rose-patterned fine bone china and infused with floral flavours, including a delightful elderflower champagne.

A beautifully-restored farmhouse located down the winding back alleys of rural Wales, Jabajak is an award-winning (and rare!) Welsh vineyard set in 7 acres of serene bucolic idyll. The decor is contemporary yet rustic, tasteful oak furnishings contrasted against original exposed stone and pristine whitewash. And the grounds are immaculate, luxurious vineyard unfurling across verdant hillslope pastures into which are woven fragrant flowerbeds for a truly sensory experience.

The lounge bar and restaurant both, naturally, serve Jabajak’s homegrown wine, a delicious harmony of Phoenix and Seyval grapes described as a “flinty, crisp white with gooseberry notes.” The menu seems designed to compliment these flavours; dishes prepared with garden-grown fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, then paired with seasonal foraged flavours such as wild garlic or nettles. It’s no wonder Jabajak’s restaurant has been practically drowning in awards since it opened.