IS COMFORT IN THE country still naff? Once upon a time the rules were simple: if the house was freezing, the sofa covered in dog hair and dinner was a mouthful of shot nestling in rotten pheasant breast followed by a Pearce Duff’s “shape”, you could rest assured if not content that you were staying somewhere smart.
If the place was “blissfully comfortable with chandeliers in the loo” (in the words of no less a judge than Jilly Cooper’s mother), your hosts were irredeemably nouveau