Cornwall, United Kingdom

Boskerris Hotel

Price per night from$243.77

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (GBP191.67), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Bright and beachy villa

Setting

Carbis Bay cliffs

Boskerris Hotel near St Ives has been around since the 1930s, but it’s only recently become so stylish. The renovation has traded faded seaside charm for some Mediterranean magic, with lots of glass, decking and crisp colours. Luckily, the views have stayed the same: lighthouse-filled sights worthy of featuring in a Virginia Woolf novel – and they did.  

Smith Extra

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Bottle of red or white wine

Facilities

Photos Boskerris Hotel facilities

Need to know

Rooms

15, including one suite.

Check–Out

11am, but flexible subject to availability (a charge may apply after 1pm). Earliest check-in, 3pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £230.00, including tax at 20 per cent.

More details

Rates include full English breakfast.

Hotel closed

Annually from early November to the mid-March.

At the hotel

Free WiFi throughout, DVD library, parking. In rooms: TV, Nespresso machine, Grohe bathroom fittings and White Company bath products.

Our favourite rooms

It’s got to be the Celebration room: as well as a sunken bath in the window overlooking the sea, it has double windows, a silk-adorned super king-size bed and its own wet room. For calm and tranquility, pick a Superior room – all three have a soothing colour palette.

Packing tips

Paintbrushes to partake in the arty activity, Bermuda shorts and a floppy straw sunhat.

Also

There’s a giant map of the area pinned up near reception, where the owners and past guests post their tips on where to eat, drink and visit.

Children

In this grown-up getaway, all guests must be over 18.

Food and Drink

Photos Boskerris Hotel food and drink

Top Table

Take a seat at the line of tables running along the windows and you’re guaranteed a scenic supper. If there’s a big group of you, book the separate dining area.

Dress Code

Beach babe and surf dude.

Hotel restaurant

The restaurant cooks up fresh, local produce for supper daily. Typical dishes include seared scallops with black pudding and apple puree or oven roasted hake fillet with lyonnaise potatoes, salsa verde and crispy kale. And no supper in these parts would be complete without homemade ice cream – try a scoop of white chocolate atop the decadent chocolate brownie.

 

Hotel bar

The Boskerris Bar is small space perched above St Ives Bay. If all the bar stools and armchairs are occupied, slip next door to the sitting room or out onto the decked terrace. Sound-wise, expect a musical journey from Spanish guitar at breakfast to jazz in the evenings, with bossa nova beats in between.

Last orders

Breakfast is 8.30am–10am; dinner 6.30pm–8.30pm. Drinks are available in the bar until 11.30pm.

Room service

Order up mezze and charcuterie boards anytime between 8.30am and 8pm.

Location

Photos Boskerris Hotel location
Address
Boskerris Hotel
Boskerris Road, Carbis Bay
St Ives
TR26 2NQ
United Kingdom

Planes

The airport in Newquay is roughly 50 minutes away by car. Fly there from London Gatwick in an hour.

Trains

The nearest train station is Carbis Bay, 200m away. Trains go hourly from here to St Ives in five minutes. First Great Western (www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk) runs hour-long services from here to Truro, with a change in St Erth. Or go direct from St Erth which is on the London Paddington to Penzance main line – from here, the 10-minute cab to the hotel will cost around £10.

Automobiles

St Ives is a five-minute car journey from the hotel. The drive from London will take around five hours. From Exeter, use the A30 until you reach the A3074 and follow it towards St Ives, turning off at Carbis Bay. There’s free parking.

Worth getting out of bed for

Treat yourself to an unusual ice-cream from Willy Waller’s Ice Cream Factory (+44 (0)1736 795761), where flavours include blackcurrant and liquorice and lavender and honey. Watch a play at the Minack, the outdoor theatre built into the cliffs at Porthcurno, near Land’s End. Check out the collection of works by local and international potters at St Ives Ceramics on Fish Street (+44 (0)1736 794930). The Tate St Ives on Porthmeor Beach (+44 (0)1736 796226) has a world-class permanent collection and a rather good exhibition guestlist, too. St Ives Ceramics on Fish Street (+44 (0)1736 794930). The Tate St Ives on Porthmeor Beach (+44 (0)1736 796226) has a world-class permanent collection and a rather good exhibition guestlist, too.

Local restaurants

Ask for a table upstairs at Alba (01736 797222), a seafood restaurant built into the old lifeboat station on the harbour in St Ives, and enjoy some Fowey mussels and Cornish crab. Settle onto the decking area of the Porthminster Café (+44 (0)1736 795352) and spend the afternoon or evening trying out its excellent seafood (the fish and chips and squid with miso are especially good). Juicy burgers await at eco-friendly Blas Burgers (+44 (0)1736 797272), a relaxed and informal eatery where the furniture’s made from driftwood and all takeaway boxes are biodegradeable. Vegetarians can bring their own wine along to Spinacio’s (+44 (0)1736 798818) for herbivorous feasts overlooking the harbour.

Local bars

The cocktails come with views at The Hub (01736 799099) on the seafront in St Ives. Try out your Cornish by chatting with the locals at the oldest pub in town – The Sloop (01736 796584) by the harbour is a perfect sun spot in the summer.

Reviews

Photos Boskerris Hotel reviews
Alex Larman

Anonymous review

By Alex Larman, Boulevardier extraordinaire

As Mrs Smith and I trudged up the hill to the Boskerris Hotel, I turned to her and, whimsically, said ‘As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives...’
She was unimpressed. ‘Wrong St Ives. You’re thinking of the one in Cambridgeshire.’ Her brow darkened. ‘Also I don’t like the seven wives bit. Are you suggesting polygamy?’

Reader, one Mrs Smith can be enough at times, let alone seven. So it was a welcome relief that the whitewashed walls of the Boskerris came into view and saved me from answering awkward questions. Although it bills itself as ‘Boskerris Hotel St Ives’, it’s about a mile and a half outside the main area, in the picturesque setting of Carbis Bay. This proves a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s a good deal quieter than many of the tourist-hungry establishments that dominate the coastline a little way along; on the other, it’s a bit of a walk into town, although only the lazy or fainthearted would not thrill to the trek.

We entered the hotel to a warm welcome from a delightful lady. Belying the mundane exterior, which isn’t the best guide to the hotel, the interior offers a vague New Hamptons feel, with whitewashed walls and floors, a cosily compact bar and downstairs sitting room with vistas of the bay and a sweet little dining room where one can enjoy lavish breakfasts and Mediterranean-styled dinners. After a helpful, rather than boringly pedantic tour, we were shown up to our superior room complete with sea views, and, more bizarrely, a look at the neighbours’ immaculately kept lawn. (We looked hard for garden gnomes, but didn’t see any. Perhaps the nearby seals had made off with them.)

Our bolthole wasn’t enormous, but it had all the trinkets that we required, from an iPod dock and bouncily comfortable bed to a surprisingly deluxe bathroom, complete with invitingly opulent bath. Mrs Smith indicated her satisfaction at this state of affairs by retiring to it, while I amused myself with a nibble of the excellent homemade shortbread and reading one of the selection of magazines provided. Alas the local newspaper, The Cornishman (sample headline: ‘Six St Ives public toilets to close this year’) was not on offer.

Refreshed, we braved the clifftop walk into St Ives. We’d been told that it was mainly flat, which was accurate... After a steep climb up that left both of us red in the face and panting, while still trying blithely to deny that our decadent hill-avoiding metropolitan ways were to blame for our torpor. Still, the sea air braced, and various amusements enthralled, including spying the most incongruous pair of yellow-lycra-clad joggers, grimly running up and down like a pair of sweaty bananas.

St Ives, on the coast of the Celtic Sea, certainly doesn’t lack for places to feast, guzzle or sip. We are now particularly big fans of the Blas Burgerworks, an unpretentious little place that has furniture fashioned entirely from reclaimed materials; it also serves the best burgers we’ve ever eaten, from Mrs Smith’s halloumi monster to my fabulous beef creation dripping in Cornish blue cheese. The Sloop is a harbourside pub offers grizzled charm (and the notorious local cider, Rattler, which has been known to send men mad), which many of the regulars seem to have been coming to since its inception in the 14th century. There’s also the famous Porthminster Beach Café, which veers closer to fine dining, with excellent dishes including a sticky pork salad that offered melt-in-mouth succulence at far more sympathetic prices that you’d get in a bigger town.

This seaside town just north of Penzance is also renowned as a centre for the arts, what with the Tate’s outpost and the Barbara Hepworth museum both attracting droves of culture seekers. We weren’t personally blown away by the Tate’s current exhibition of abstract modern art (Mrs Smith even harrumphed a couple of times), but the recently opened Hepworth museum, set where the sculptor used to live, offers a poignant overview of the Modernist’s work and her life. She died aged 72 in a fire in the studio, which has been painstakingly rebuilt, and the overall effect looks as though she’s just popped out for a moment. Perhaps, one rather hopes, for a Blas burger.

We headed back to the Boskerris by taxi (and our jovial driver told us of his own tribulations the times he’s had too many Rattlers), where we’d booked to have our farewell dinner downstairs in the 15-room hotel. The evening menu is simple and decently priced, offering old favourites such as Greek salad for a starter and excellent fish and chips for a main, the copious size of which defeated even my hearty appetite. As the end of the meal loomed, Mrs Smith adopted a faraway expression and said, wistfully, ‘I can see the fireworks...’

I saw this as the precursor to an evening of high romance, and adopted an amorous expression. ‘Where, my sweet?’ She looked at me with that dear smile that she adopts when I’ve done something silly. It’s a well-worn expression. ‘Outside the window, you nit.’

The sky was alight with pyrotechnics of every colour and hue, glittering and shimmering away. The friendly waitress confirmed that this did happen from time to time, to celebrate a party of some kind or for good luck. But as we gazed over the darkened bay, lit only by the iridescent hues of cheap gunpowder, this moment of my weekend felt as transcendent as anything I’d experienced in ages, and I felt heartily, humbly grateful for this rare moment of peace. Carbis Bay, we’ll be back.

 

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Price per night from $243.77