Avonhelm
Fifty-eight rooms in three Georgian townhouses in Bath, knocked through on the lower floors. The walled garden is at the back and the spring-fed plunge pool in the basement, while the small casino is on the first floor of the middle house.
The house
Three addresses, one hall
The terrace went up in the 1790s and the three houses spent two centuries as separate addresses with separate arguments about the guttering. The lower floors were opened into one another in 1987. You can now walk from breakfast in one house to a drink in another without going outside, which in a Bath January counts as a feature.
The sash windows run throughout, and the stone staircase has an iron rail polished by about two hundred years of hands. The floorboards creak in a pattern the night porter claims to be able to read.
No two of the fifty-eight rooms are quite the same size, and the numbering follows the original houses instead of any logic. We’ve stopped apologising for it.
Rooms
Four kinds of room
Sash-window doubles over the terrace, garden rooms on the ground floor of the north house, attic rooms under the slates, and one very large room on the first floor with the original shutters. All have a bath, and most look out on something built of the same stone as the house you’re standing in.
Eating and drinking
The Long Room and The Morning Room
The Long Room runs across the back of the middle house and looks into the garden. Breakfast is served every day and dinner Tuesday to Saturday, from a short menu that changes when the kitchen feels like it.
The Morning Room at the front of the south house is a bar that keeps being used for breakfast, and we’ve given up correcting people. It opens at eleven and closes when the last conversation ends.
Avonhelm Casino
Up the stone stair, first floor
The casino is on the first floor of the middle house, behind its own door off the landing. Take the stone stair from the hall or the small lift beside it; you never have to step outside, whether you’re staying with us or came in through the front door.
There are tables, a bar in the corner, and room for perhaps sixty people before it stops being pleasant. It opens in the evenings. You must be over 18 and show photo ID at the door on every visit, hotel guests included. A jacket is preferred and trainers get noticed.
Limits are set on the floor by the staff who run the tables, so ask before you sit down. All play happens in the room. This website is for information only, and it hosts no games and takes no bets or payments.
Where we are
A quarter of an hour from the station
Ashcombe Terrace is on the slope north of the city centre. Bath Spa station is a twelve minute walk downhill and a longer one back up. The Roman Baths, the Abbey and the Pulteney Bridge are all within the same twenty minutes on foot.
We don’t have a car park, but we do have a permit, a hand-drawn map and a member of staff who’ll explain both.