Cotswolds, United Kingdom

The Close

Price per night from$154.33

Price information

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

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (GBP120.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Country heir

Setting

Village high street

Tetbury’s The Close is just the right mix of classic Cotswolds and modern country house. With its mod-Brit restaurant, a hidden garden, and a spacious bar with a touch of rustic whimsy, you’ll want to sink into a sturdy leather sofa by the man-sized fireplace and never return to the city…  

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A welcome glass of chilled Prosecco each on arrival

Facilities

Photos The Close facilities

Need to know

Rooms

18

Check–Out

11am; earliest check-in, 4pm. Both are flexible by two hours for £20, subject to availability.

More details

Rates include breakfast; choose from a Continental buffet, full English, cooked-to-order and à la carte options.

Also

Become one with the Cotswolds and indulge in a cream tea (with champagne, of course) in the hotel’s bar or gardens.

At the hotel

Free WiFi throughout, on-site parking. In rooms: TV, WiFi, free bottled water, tea- and coffee-making facilities and luxury bath products.

Our favourite rooms

All rooms are individually decorated and have pops of vibrant colour. We love the eaves in Jubilee, a cosy top-floor Very Good Room; there’s a separate seating area, too. For light-flooding windows and a relaxing soak, spring for the Dove Excellent Room, which has garden-view windows, a feminine four-poster bed and an impressive roll-top tub in the bathroom.

Packing tips

Bring a book to read by the fireplace, a whimsical picnic basket to take on your country strolls, and a longer-than-average-lead for your furry four-legged friend.

Pet‐friendly

Pampered pooches can join you for £20 a night, per dog (doggy beds and bowls are included). See more pet-friendly hotels in Cotswolds.

Children

Welcome, but there isn’t much space for running around in the quiet communal areas or the guest rooms. Kids can eat in the Garden Room Restaurant and there are special menus and chairs for littles.

Food and Drink

Photos The Close food and drink

Top Table

In the Garden Room Restaurant, try to snag a seat by the window for the garden views, which are all lit-up and twinkly at night.

Dress Code

It’s a relaxed and homey hotel, so cosy country cardigans won’t go amiss… but no one will bat an eyelid if you fancy getting glammed up for dinner.

Hotel restaurant

The appropriately named Garden Room Restaurant has lovely views over the grounds, with a seasonal menu that spans from breakfast through to lunch and dinner. Handsome parquet floors and decadent deep-blue walls unfurl beneath a stuccoed, double-height ceiling. Mounted stags heads, stacked bookshelves and an array of country-style paintings help set the Cotswolds scene. Refined dishes include sloe-gin-cured salmon, pan-roasted duck breast and local Gloucester old spot pork chops with sautéed potatoes and baked-apple sauce. In short, you won't leave hungry.  

Hotel bar

With its high domed ceiling and candle chandelier, inviting leather seating and walls of Katherine Lightfoot paintings, the cosy bar is a serious Cotswolds crowd-pleaser. Curl up with a book and a warming dram of whisky or decadent mug of cream-topped hot chocolate by the fireplace, or snag bar-side bucket seats for apéritifs. Order light bites, sandwiches and sharing plates throughout the day, and sip afternoon tea from 2.30 to 6pm.

Last orders

The Garden Room Restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Room service

Have anything from the bar or restaurant menu delivered to your room, from sandwiches to sharing platters and the full children's menu.

Location

Photos The Close location
Address
The Close
The Close Hotel, Long Street, Tetbury
Tetbury
GL8 8AQ
United Kingdom

You’ll find the hotel in the centre of Cotswolds market town Tetbury, 45 minutes from Bath.

Planes

Bristol Airport is an hour away by car; arrange a transfer with the hotel for around £70.

Trains

Trains from London pull into Kemble station, eight miles from the hotel; arrange a taxi for around £20.

Automobiles

Drivers are in luck: the M4 and M5 from London, the Midlands and the South West make motoring to the hotel a breeze, so long as traffic cooperates. There’s also free on-site parking behind the garden; to get there use postcode GL8 8DU for the SatNav.

Worth getting out of bed for

The Close is the perfect base for exploring the Cotswolds, from its little market towns and greenery-filled rambles to historic Bath and royal gardens. Enjoy the foliage at Westonbirt Arboretum, with its manicured walks and viewing platforms, or take a tour of beautiful Highgrove Gardens, and book a champagne tea for afterwards. In town, markets of the antique, farmer and crafts kinds pop up every Wednesday and Saturday, and if you’re visiting in September, be sure to check out classically-inclined Tetbury Music Festival. Active types will enjoy a spot of sailing in the Cerneys and walking in nearby Malmsbury. Afterwards, treat yourself to a massage at Calcot Manor.

Local restaurants

For gourmet wood-oven-cooked pizza, head to locavore-loving the Priory on London Road. For fine dining, dinner at nearby Calcot Manor’s Mediterranean restaurant The Conservatory is not to be missed. Five minutes out of Tetbury on Cirencester Road, The Trouble House Inn is a traditional Cotswolds country pub serving a daily-changing blackboard menu of specials such as Cornish fish soup and hay-roasted ribeye of beef. For a fresh fish lunch, make the 20 minutes drive to William's Food Hall in nearby Nailsworth. Further afield, The Potting Shed in Crudwell is wonderful for lunch or dinner. The menu changes seasonally, but start with the smoked duck and end with the maple roasted figs if you’re given the chance.

Local cafés

Quirky Cafe 53 on Long Street is a good bet for pancake breakfasts and warming coffee breaks. For lunches and afternoon pick-me-ups, stop by Church Street’s the Blue Zucchini Brasserie, which serves bistro food, insane-looking milkshakes, and giant slices of home-made cakes.

Local bars

Pull on your wellies and ramble over to the Snooty Fox for drinks, or work up an appetite with an hour’s country stroll to The Cat & Custard Pot: the perfect spot for Sunday lunch. Just past Westonbirt, local favourite The Holford Arms has local ales and modern British pub fare.

Reviews

Photos The Close reviews
Emma Barnett

Anonymous review

By Emma Barnett, Brilliant broadcaster

The Flake girl from those iconic 1990s adverts ain’t got nothing on me. The minute I see a freestanding roll-top bath tub – especially one in the centre of a spacious bathroom, complete with a black-and-white checkerboard-topped side table for my magazine – I am in it. Up to my eyeballs in steaming hot bubbles. After a swift check-in at the cosy Close Hotel in the chocolate-box market town of Tetbury (the reception desk situated next to a roaring fire, where we gratefully warmed our hands on a freezing evening), my husband and I found ourselves ensconced in our capacious room, overlooking the hotel’s charming courtyard.

Our room, named Dove, came complete with a large, brass bumblebee door knocker, resembling something out of an English countryside interior-design dream. Pink, rose-patterned, floor-to-ceiling heavy curtains matched the pleated headboard of the grand, four-poster bed. And my goodness, what a bed; Louis XIV would have been envious of its dizzying height and twisting wooden posts. We immediately regressed to a childlike state and threw ourselves onto its colossal, bouncy mattress – coats still on.

The walls were half clotted cream-coloured wood panels and half mottled, grey-and-white-spotted wallpaper. We both particularly appreciated two large, red brocade armchairs set up by one of the grand windows, around a dainty coffee table primed for morning newspaper reading – having just ordered our rag of choice. But oh, the bathroom – let us return there. While I got straight to the running of my steamy, dreamy bath night – ahem – in the white-waffle hotel robe, my husband enjoyed figuring out the mood music, fiddling with the clever, mirrored-wall TV.

A delightful – if unexpected – touch were the evening church bells as we warmed up our cold, British bodies before our eight-course feast.

As a loather of mornings, I was surprised to find myself looking forward to being awoken by a similarly glorious peal. The slightly uneven floors on the way to dinner in the brasserie were a quiet nod to the history of this 16th-century building. The butter-yellow walls, filled with framed pictures birds, butterflies and leaves, gave way to a dark blue-grey downstairs, where walls were adorned with endless paintings of animals. A cornucopia of sheep, dog, cow, horse and elephant pictures made up an entire wall of the well-appointed bar – which boasted a magnificent glass roof and ceiling.

The atmospheric, dimly lit restaurant, also painted midnight blue-grey, was fitted with ornate working fireplaces at both ends, adding to its cosy feel. Mercifully, however, it was kitted out with modern furniture: tan-leather tub chairs as opposed to those awful shabby-chic benches or unforgiving rough-wood seats, which love snagging tights and causing bottom-numbness during a lengthy meal.

We were almost immediately greeted with some lovely, unordered nibbles – my favourite kind; food, before food. Piping-hot parsnip arancini and homemade bread sticks with creamy carrot hummus were welcome friends as we picked our cocktails of choice.

This is a chef who knows how to please. We ambled our way through an adventurous tasting menu, opening with seared mackerel, followed by rich venison and – for all my fellow Nineties kids – ending with a homemade, dark-chocolate Aero. But the pièce de résistance? A fluffy Poire William soufflé which was rolled out last, and finished us both off brilliantly. It really was a triumph, as was the whole meal – apart from a cold cauliflower bavoir that missed the mark.

Breakfast was a similarly tasty, warming affair, especially the innovative ham-and-gruyère hash-browns. The atmospheric lighting was now replaced with the cold light of a Cotswold day, illuminating a pretty, corniced cream ceiling, as well as the manicured grounds of the hotel. A freezing-cold Cotswolds day greeted us outside, but thanks to the hotel’s central position on Tetbury’s main street, we were soon ensconced within the bosom of the busy weekend outdoor market, situated in the historic Market House structure first erected in 1655 and expressly designed for the sale of wool and yarn.

Once we’d stocked up on local jams, we headed into the town’s other great commercial draw: the official Highgrove shop, a sort of mini Harrods, filled with gorgeous produce from the aforementioned home of HRH the Prince of Wales, situated just outside of Tetbury, and where you can book garden tours. The small town is also famous for its quirky antique and interior-design shops, all housed in the same traditional, warm Cotswolds stone as the Close Hotel. Shopping was very much the order of the day, while the ice-cold wind bit. Consequently, we decided to save the nearby national arboretum of Westonbirt for our last day, post check-out, and scuttled back to the warmth of our room and into those massive armchairs.

Complimentary flapjacks, delivered with our tea, were soon in our grateful hands while we dreamily gazed over the Close’s courtyard and the day’s newspaper headlines, all within our comfortable room. All that was left for us to do on our final afternoon was fill up the bath tub again. It would be rude not to…

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Price per night from $154.33