Hambleton Hall

Walter Marshall built Hambleton Hall in 1881 as a hunting lodge on a peninsula above what is now Rutland Water; his sister Eva Astley Paston Cooper later hosted Noel Coward and Malcolm Sargent there. Tim and Stefa Hart bought the house in 1979 for £110,000, spent a further £400,000 on renovation, and opened it as a hotel and restaurant in July 1980, drawing on ideas from Michel Guerard's Les Pres d'Eugenie in France. Chef Nick Gill helped the restaurant win a Michelin star in 1982, a title Hambleton Hall has held every year since, the longest continuous run of any UK restaurant. The Harts still own and run the fifteen-bedroom hotel, one of the few founding couples still in residence at the country-house hotel they created.