Rooms with added sex appeal (From Swindon Advertiser)

Rooms with added sex appeal

9:06am Thursday 5th August 2010 in

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The Crab at Chieveley Wantage Road, Chieveley, Berkshire RG20 8UE 01635 247550. www.crabatchieveley.com Room rates from £125 to £215 for two people including breakfast

AT FIRST glance, The Crab at Chieveley is the quintessential English pub.

But look a bit closer and you’ll find it’s anything but typical.

Sipping a chilled chablis in the garden, you notice that while you are surrounded by waving wheatfields, there are palms running alongside and bamboo growing next to the pear tree. Inside, the pub is more harbourside than countryside, which reflects The Crab’s highly-regarded fish restaurant (see next week’s Entertainer for review).

And moving on to its rooms, you are transported if not to another world at least to a far-flung part of this one.

The Crab has endeavoured to recreate luxury hotel rooms from exotic locations. We stayed in Chiva Som, named after a health resort in Thailand.

My well-travelled companion said it reminded him more of Malaysia . . . but whatever, it was nicely exotic and on a sultry summer’s day you could well imagine you were in the Far East. The furniture was cane, the “wallpaper” was made of bamboo, the floor was stone and bathroom marble.

And the feeling of being somewhere far away continued as we stepped outside to the private patio with its own hot tub. Just a little word of warning – although the patio seemed delightfully secluded as we splashed about in the hot tub at midnight, we were a little less giggly the next morning when we heard the man next door talking quite audibly, and not particularly loudly, on his mobile phone on the next terrace.

So, if we could hear him he could probably . . . oh well, let’s just hope he was a heavy sleeper! There are 13 rooms at The Crab – including Cipriani Palace (Venice), Gleneagles (Scotland), Raffles (Singapore) and La Mamounia (Marrakech) – five have hot tub gardens and there’s a spa suite Banyan Tree (Phuket).

The themed rooms are done well and a lot of fun to stay in. They turn what could have been a perfectly nice but rather ordinary country pub B&B into a real experience.

A taste of the exotic with no long haul flights, no jabs and no jet lag . . . you can wake up in the Seychelles for breakfast and nip back down the M4 and be home in time for lunch!

Hotel Pelirocco 10 Regency Square, Brighton BN1 2FG 01273 327055. www.hotelpelirocco.co.uk Room rates from £50 (single) £90 (double) to £250 including breakfast

IN THE traditional home of the dirty weekend, hotels don’t come much naughtier than the Pelirocco.

Not only is there an erotic boutique room service menu – with items too rude to mention in a family newspaper – but many of the 19 rooms are specifically designed with “love” in mind (love, of course, being a euphemism for raunchy/kinky sex).

It’s all done with a tremendous sense of fun. Known as a rock and roll crash pad, guests have included musicians, actors and comedians along with regular run-of-the-mill punks, poseurs, mods, rockers and, when we stayed, a happy Nordic family of mum, dad and gaggle of blonde smiley children. So everyone really.

The hotel happily admits that over its 10-year history it’s become less hipster hotel than bohemian B&B with as much seaside smut as teen-beat nostalgia gracing its seen-it-all walls.

But it’s still undeniably hip – ever-changing art and photography crowd the walls, there’s a PlayStation console in every room, a cocktail bar with pink leather banquettes and Blondie was played as the background music for one of the hotel’s excellent breakfasts.

The themed rooms include the Pin-Up Parlour dedicated to Swindon’s own sex siren Diana Dors Betty’s Boudoir created with the 50s bombshell Betty Page in mind and what’s billed as the ultimate “dirty weekend” suite - the Playroom, pictured above – complete with 8ft circular bed, overhead mirror, pole dancing area and a bath tub for two . . . or more!

It’s not all naughtiness – there’s a single room dedicated to Muhammad Ali, a Modrophenia room, Soul Supreme and plenty of others to chose from.

We stayed in the Stoli Salon which has a Russian theme which included bottles of vodka set in the walls which lit up and changed colours. But it was one of the smallest details that impressed me the most – a vintage copy of From Russia With Love on the bedside table.

Just a little thing but then size doesn’t always matter . . . and if it does there’s always that room service menu!