Lee Mill Bridge Devon hotels:

A remarkable survival of a George II country house, complete with many original contents. The stunning state rooms were designed by Robert Adam and contain exceptional furniture by Chippendale and family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. There is plasterwork of the highest quality throughout, as well as original Chinese wallpaper in several rooms. The Great Kitchen is possibly England s most complete survival of a large country house kitchen, fully fitted out with its original copper utensils, early kitchen gadgets and great spit. The delightful gardens, set in undulating parkland and particularly fine in spring, contain a wealth of follies, an early 18th-century Melancholy Walk and fine specimen trees and shrubs. Saltram was one of the locations for the film of Jane Austen s novel Sense and Sensibility. The picture collection is still virtually as Lord Boringdon left it, including ten paintings by his close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds advised Lord Boringdon on his other acquisitions, among them works by Angelica Kauffman and a number of Italian, Dutch and Flemish paintings. In 1768 Lord Boringdon turned to Robert Adam, the most fashionable architect and interior designer of the day, to create a suite of Neo-classical rooms along the east front which reaches a climax in the Saloon. Adam designed almost everything - from the huge plasterwork ceiling and matching carpet in the Saloon to the ornate door-handles - and Saltram now preserves one of the finest Adam interiors in Britain. A pleasant Victorian informal garden lies to the west of the house, a soothing mixture of informal lawns, wooded glades and shrubs, with grass walks bordered by magnolias, camellias, rhododendrons and a number of good specimen trees.