Best hotels in Pembrokeshire | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Pembrokeshire

Pembrokeshire works on you slowly. The coastline — designated a national park since 1952, the only one in Britain defined almost entirely by its shoreline — is composed of such geological extremes that the built environment tends toward the modest and the apologetic. Slate-roofed farmhouses, whitewashed cottages, castle ruins at Pembroke and Carew that sit in the landscape like bones. There is no architecture here that competes with the cliffs at St Govan's Head or the offshore islands stacked with seabirds. Travelers who come looking for a designed environment in the conventional sense tend to leave confused. Those who understand that restraint and setting can themselves constitute a design philosophy find it one of the more affecting corners of Britain. Narberth, a small market town in the inland east of the county, has become the exception to that general quietness. It has something approaching a food and creative culture — independent shops, the kind of farmers' market that attracts people from Cardiff — and it is here that the Grove of Narberth operates. The property is a late-Georgian manor house set within fifteen acres of grounds, and the renovation has been handled with the seriousness the building deserves: the rooms and suites are furnished with a sensibility that reads as contemporary Welsh without being programmatic about it, warm and particular rather than neutral and aspirational. The kitchen garden supplies a restaurant that takes its local sourcing obligations more seriously than most, and the spa and pool are integrated into the grounds without the usual rupture between new addition and old fabric. At around $359 a night, it occupies the upper tier of what the Welsh countryside offers, and it earns that position. What the Grove understands — and what makes it the right base for Pembrokeshire — is that the county itself is the amenity. The Preseli Hills are a short drive north; the Pembrokeshire Coast Path begins its 186-mile circuit at Amroth, less than half an hour away. The hotel provides the warmth and the considered interior that makes returning from a day on the cliffs feel like an event rather than a retreat. That combination of landscape as spectacle and building as counterweight is, in this part of Wales, the entire logic of staying somewhere well.