The Sunday Telegraph: August 2010

Mr and Mrs Smith has gained a reputation as a guidebook with its eye firmly on the boutique hotel market, and this is an impressive and very useful book, combining pleasing design with in-depth hotel reviews, which each read like short travel articles.

Each hotel is given a generous few pages, including excellent colour photographs, with a description of the surrounding region and local activities like wine tasting or sailing. As well as a personal and readable account of each hotel, and a section on local eating and drinking, each review has an ‘In the Know’ section, which is useful for its descriptions of the best rooms, for example, or the top table in a particular hotel. The book also contains a card for six months’ free membership of Mr and Mrs Smith, which offers member-only privileges such as spa treatments or champagne on arrival at many of the featured hotels.

EXTRACT ‘The first impressions of Le Couvent were delightful, the austere 17^th century facade giving way to an interior that more than lives up to the fantasy of a fairy-tale castle, filled with chandeliers and candlelit stone staircases, and the whole building somehow enveloped in a delicious chocolatey fragrance. The bar, lounge and suites are stylishly and comfortably kitted out, and I particularly appreciated the honesty bar when, following our day of automotive tribulation, I was able to dilute my frustration with alcohol without feeling the need to make small talk with bar staff or look pleadingly at passing waiters.’