Hotel Hit Squad: 'I wanted to assemble the decorative dogs and line them all up to be squashed by morning traffic' – Inside Jesmond Dene House
I always think the star system for hotels is a lot of nonsense. I stayed in one of a collection of chalets on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion a while back which had a two-star rating and looked straight out of World of Interiors, albeit with frugal bathroom products. Earlier this year, I spent a night in a five-star hotel in Chile featuring bedrooms that felt 100 per cent Travelodge, with an entirely empty and wholly unstaffed cocktail bar downstairs decked out with a dusty acrylic chandelier and walls painted 50 different shades of Montezuma’s Revenge. Continuing the theme, Jesmond Dene House is the fanciest hotel in Newcastle but clocks in at four stars – which, when I visited recently, felt about right, but also made me think about what we mean when we talk about stars.
When I arrived on a sunny but misty late autumn afternoon, I was bewitched by the place. This 19th-century mansion on the edge of some of the prettiest parkland in the North East looks like the central location for a classic Hammer horror – handsome and mildly malevolent, with icy fog roiling around its beautiful brickwork. I wanted to see Jacqueline Pearce at the door wearing something fabulously gothic.
Inside, the Great Hall matches the exterior – a double-height oak-panelled fantasy complete with minstrel gallery. This is the big draw for Jesmond Dene House: it’s where brides meet their grooms and the real revenue stream kicks in. If only the rest of the hotel had the same strength of character.
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It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that the house deserves better than the plastic-looking striped flooring in the dining room, the comment cards on the tables next to the dwarf orchids, the overhead light fittings hanging from square boards that don’t fit the round holes in the elegant ceiling stucco, and the fiendishly awful little decorative dogs crafted from wire hanger material that occupy every space. I wanted to assemble them all under cover of darkness and line them up on the drive outside to be squashed by morning traffic.
Then there is the music – the worst imaginable cover of Your Song accompanied my Tanqueray No 10 gin and tonic in the bar (served without a slice of grapefruit – yes, I know… Brexit etc, but still). “Is all this somehow Spotify-generated?” I asked my dining companion. “No, actual humans can have taste this bad.”
And yet, after a couple of hours, I “got it”. They have just finished a refurbishment of all the rooms at Jesmond Dene House, though you might not know it. Which isn’t to say it looks bad at all. It’s just that there’s no “wow” factor upstairs, and there isn’t an ounce of rustic chic. Instead, it’s a suburban kind of luxury with pedestrian choices of marble, tiling and wallpaper; the kind of interiors that the posh couple in a Mike Leigh film would be given by the art director.
This is a hotel that does mid-market luxury well, in a building that has spectacular cheek bones and a golden egg-laying goose out the back in the form of non-stop wedding bookings. It’s where you take your mum for a special dinner and an overnight stay. It is what it is and it’s successful.
One thing that the hotel certainly has going for it is location. The Jesmond Dene strip of parkland nearby – from which the hotel takes its name – is bliss on a crisp autumn day. If I lived here, I’d be tempted to buy a dog just to make the most of walks by the waterfall. And if I moved to Newcastle I definitely would live here: it’s a neighbourhood full of chic new coffee shops and restaurants.
Architecture aside, the service at Jesmond Dene House is what makes it. I found every member of staff pitch-perfect on attitude and delivery. If the restaurant lacked a decent carpet, it made up for it with the bonhomie of everyone front of house. The food is good too – local produce of the pig, steak and root veg variety, with a lovely Whitby crab dish with oyster, dill, lemon and radish, and a similarly pleasing Ragstone cheese risotto with parsnip, kale and pear. It’s all solid and delicious, with excellent eggs Benedict for breakfast.
Everything I ate, and how I ate it, was the essence of a good four-star hotel – it’s neither outlandishly priced nor pretentious. You couldn’t open a Mayfair-level hotel here, because there’s no market for £10 glasses of fruit juice, but Jesmond Dene House is somewhere you would go regularly if logistics allowed. Would I stay overnight again? Maybe not.
But if anyone wants to invite me to a wedding there, I’m in.
Room rates start at £123 per night, including breakfast. There are three accessible rooms for guests with disabilities. Mark C O’Flaherty travelled as a guest of LNER (lner.co.uk), which runs a direct rail service from London to Newcastle, taking from 2hr 50 mins and costing £20.50 each way.
