Beautiful boudoirs from just £70
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Top 10 sexy hotels by Mr & Mrs Smith
There\'s nothing worse than embarking on a romantic break only to discover the hotel room - despite what it looked like on the website - is a dreary mélange of bad food, hard beds and dripping taps. Rufus Purdy, editor of the Mr & Mrs Smith boutique-hotel guides, picks out his 10 favourite beautiful boudoirs from the travel experts\' 500-plus collection.
Best for... Regency glamour
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Bellinter House Hotel, Navan, County Meath, Ireland
Bellinter House, Navan, County Meath, Ireland
Jane Austen would have liked the Palladian splendour of Bellinter House. She\'d have loved watching Regency ladies sweep up its grand, cantilevered staircase, and fan themselves coquettishly as they giggled over the society gentlemen tripping fancily below. She might, though, have felt a little unsure of all the modern art on the walls and the primary-coloured contemporary furniture in the glorious Main House attic rooms. But for those of us who like our Philippe Starck as much as our Lizzie Bennet, there\'s just the right blend of luxurious noughties trappings - huge flatscreen TVs, Bose sound systems, mood lighting - and authentic 18th century features.
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Doubles from €225, including breakfast.
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Best for... being on a budget
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The Bull Hotel, Bridport, Dorset, UK
The Bull Hotel, Bridport, Dorset, UK
If the sexually paralysed protagonists of Ian McEwan\'s On Chesil Beach had chosen to spend their honeymoon at The Bull Hotel, just inland from their chosen spot on Dorset\'s Jurassic Coast, then the erotic urge might have come a little more freely. Who, after all, could lie beneath crimson drapes on an enormous Elizabethan-style four-poster bed, while orchid-like swirls of pink loom down from the scarlet wallpaper behind, without feeling just a little bit saucy? And that\'s just Room 104. Crikey. It\'s enough to make you want to take a cold dip in your freestanding, roll-top bath.
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Doubles from £70, including breakfast.
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Best for... traditional romance
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Ca Maria Adele, Venice, Italy
Ca Maria Adele, Venice, Italy
Venice oozes romance in that slightly over-the-top way, which we all love to indulge in sometimes. Step outside this baroque gem of a hotel, and you\'ll find gondolas floating along the adjacent canal and all those twisting alleyways where so many have proposed on a whim. But in Ca Maria Adele\'s top-floor suite, which overlooks Giudecca Island and the church of Madonna Della Salute, you can happily divide your time between making like Casanova and Francesca in the king-size bed, or doing the same in the African wood-covered Jacuzzi right next to it. Aqua plus amore equals perfetto.
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Doubles from €300, including breakfast.
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Best for... hiding from friends
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Can Verru, Ibiza, Spain
Can Verru, Ibiza, Spain
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One of Mr & Mrs Smith\'s many stylish self-catering properties on the ultimate party island, Can Verru, a favourite of Kylie Minogue, is an enormous Gaudí-esque villa set in orchard-filled grounds that buzz with bees and happy vibes. If you should be so lucky to get your partner to this idyllic corner of the Balearics, then make sure you bagsy the main bedroom in the separate Moroccan-style cottage for yourselves before any of your friends get a look at it. The bed\'s certainly worth fighting for. Climb through an Arabic arch and into an enormous Moorish-inspired space fitted with a soft, custom-made mattress and filled with crimson bedsheets. To paraphrase Kylie, we can\'t get it out of our head.
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The property, which sleeps 12, is available to rent from £5,000 a week.
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Best for... Tudor role play
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Charlton House, Northeast Somerset, UK
Charlton House, Northeast Somerset, UK
The Mulberry-swathed, classic environs of Charlton House are the ideal backdrop for a spot of old-school courting, and all 25 of this boutique hotel\'s rooms rack up high scores on the Ridiculously Romantic scale. The South Wing room offers a four-poster bed constructed from an original Elizabethan fireplace, so you can take your wench or squire a-bed, and tumble merrily beneath a panelled canopy and an ornately carved - and incredibly beautiful - 16th century headboard. Thankfully, the plumbing\'s reassuringly 2009 - which means that a piping hot bath for two in the freestanding, claw-footed green tub is also an option.
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Doubles from £180, including breakfast and use of the spa.
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Best for... a gay old time
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The Gore, London, UK
The Gore, London, UK
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If it\'s all-singing, all-dancing opulence you\'re after, then the Venus Room - one of 10 feature rooms at this stylish Victorian hotel in Kensington - does it with aplomb (and with jazz hands). Camper than a Siamese cat in a feather boa, it is worth checking into for its bathroom alone. Statues of Venus and Adonis peer down at you while you\'re rubbing in the Molton Brown, and a kitsch frieze of the goddess of love riding a chariot adorns one wall. The bed, an ornate four-poster with a glittering filigree headboard beneath scarlet and gold drapes, used to belong to Judy Garland. Fabulous. Mr & Mrs Smith - or, indeed, Mr & Mr Smith - will definitely have a feeling they\'re not in Kansas any more...
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Doubles from £149, not including breakfast.
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Best for... visual drama
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Hotel Particulier Montmartre, Paris, France
Hotel Particulier Montmartre, Paris, France
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It\'s almost impossible to choose which of the five suites at this opulent Parisian art house to plump for. Poems and Hats, for example, is a sexy black-and-white boudoir that guarantees steaminess with its seductive all-black mosaic tiled bathroom separated from the bed only by a screen of transparent glass. Too much? Try the spacious Tree with Ears, which comes with one-of-a-kind abstract wallpaper, velvet drapery and a host of other fancy fittings, or Vegetal - a serene and leafy space with shady nooks and tinkling fountains that allows you and your other half to feel as though you\'re sleeping in a light-dappled forest canopy. Perhaps just say, \"Surprise me!\" when you book...
Doubles from €290, not including breakfast.
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Best for... Latin lovers
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La Suite, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
La Suite, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
If you want to treat your partner to a fiery dose of red-hot Brazilian passion then this cliff-top villa in Joatinga, Rio\'s version of Beverly Hills, is for you. Its floor-to-ceiling windows afford you views of the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean and the Cagarras islands to one side, and, to the other, you can gaze over a jungle-fringed swathe of Rio\'s trademark beaches - not to mention Sugar Loaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer on the horizon. Opt for the elegant, hardwood-floored Purple Suite, which comes with bold striped walls, a sumptuous pillow-covered king-size bed and a two-headed lovers\' shower. Be careful, though; it\'s so huge in there that you might lose each other in all the steam.
Doubles from €300, including breakfast.
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Best for... Indian spice
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Pool House, Wester Ross, Scotland, UK
Pool House, Wester Ross, Scotland, UK
Those expecting tartan counterpanes and shortbread fingers on the bedside table are in for a surprise at this Scottish boutique hotel. The spirit of the Indian subcontinent has somehow found its way to Ross-shire, and interiors based on Maharajahs\' palaces seem to be all the Raj here. The Nairana Suite, a huge area with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and an enormous seating area, is home to the sort of antique bed you\'d usually only see in a museum. Beautifully painted landscape miniatures, framed in floral wreaths, stud the enamelled canopy and tiny inlaid pieces of mirrored glass sparkle like stars in a clear Rajasthani sky.
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Doubles from £245, including breakfast and dinner.
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Best for... good clean fun
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Riad Tarabel, Marrakech, Morocco
Riad Tarabel, Marrakech, Morocco
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What is it about hotel bathrooms that make them so much sexier than the ones you brush your teeth in every night at home? At Riad Tarabel, an intimate three-room beauty in a serene side street off Marrakech\'s Medina, the answer is obvious. The split-level bathroom in its Palmeraie Suite, a sumptuous space filled with grey patterned zellige tiles and lazy rattan daybeds, is a place in which you\'re clearly meant to relish getting naked. The shower - invitingly - has been designed for dual soaping and the enormous bathtub, which comes with fitted pillows, is easily big enough for four - not that we\'re suggesting anything.
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Doubles from €170, including breakfast.
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For more information on these or any other properties in the 500-strong Mr & Mrs Smith collection, call 0845 034 0700 or visit mrandmrssmith.com.
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