Vanbrugh House Hotel

About Vanbrugh House Hotel

Vanbrugh House stands on St Michael's Street, a short pedestrian lane running off Cornmarket that most visitors walk past without noticing. The building was put up by the Peisley family, stonemasons who worked on several of the colleges, and stayed in their hands for three generations; the name comes from a long-held and much-disputed local claim that the architect Sir John Vanbrugh had a hand in it.

The conversion is a boutique one: 22 rooms and suites, no two decorated the same way, mixing panelling, fireplaces and sash windows with strong colours, bold wallpapers and freestanding baths in the larger rooms. Standard doubles are compact, as they inevitably are in a listed building of this age, so it is worth reading the room descriptions carefully and paying up a grade if space matters to you. Some rooms are reached by stairs only.

There is no restaurant, but breakfast is served in a small ground-floor room and the location makes eating out effortless - the Covered Market, Gloucester Green and the whole of the George Street restaurant strip are within two minutes, and the Bodleian, Sheldonian and Ashmolean barely further. The lane itself is quiet at night, which is not true of everywhere this close to the centre. There is no parking, so use one of the Park and Ride sites or the Gloucester Green multi-storey around the corner.