The CottageHotel

The Ireland family has owned this hotel above Hope Cove since November 1973, when John and Janet Ireland took over a guest house first built as a private residence, Hope Cottage, in 1896, and opened to guests in 1927. Dudley and Clarrie Holliday had expanded the building substantially after buying it in 1955, adding a restaurant in the late 1950s that links the original cottage to the neighbouring Westerly House, and a room used for evening dances from 1959. A front terrace followed in 1968, and further rooms with sea-facing balconies were completed in 1985. The hotel now has 38 individually decorated rooms, many looking out over the cove, within a building shaped by additions made across the middle of the twentieth century. Wartime RAF pilots and evacuated schoolchildren were also once housed here.