You could just picture Marlene Dietrich gliding down the staircase at Burgh Island Hotel. pouting, brandishing her cigarette holder and, depending on her mood, wearing a slinky gown or spruce black tuxedo.

The staircase, flanked by etched black glass, ascends to the hotel ballroom. Here, with its grand piano and murals of 1930s party scenes, the stage is set for twice-weekly dinner-dances to the tunes of the time. At the microphone is singer Steve Chisholm whose act, as co-owner Deborah Clark puts it, is ‘pure Noël Coward’.

Chisholm croons his way through 1930s’ hits, and starry-eyed couples – same-sex partners are welcome too – waltz around the dancefloor in tuxes and cocktail frocks. It’s de rigueur to dress for dinner, and amid sparkling Champagne and tinkling piano ditties you want to look the part. Pre-dinner cocktails are a must, too, mixed in the glass-domed Palm Court by twinkly-eyed barman Gary ‘McBar’ Maguire.



The entire hotel is a feast of 1930s gorgeousness. Its ocean-liner architecture, decor and furniture are original English Modernism or period reproduction. Every fixture and fitting, down to the recumbent chrome mermaids in Gary’s bar, is part of a detailed big picture. It adds up to such an eyeful of glamour that you could imagine characters from Agatha Christie acting out their murder mysteries right here.

And you’d almost be right. The TV series Poirot has been filmed here, and Dame Agatha herself took up residence in the island’s Beach House and penned Evil Under The Sun and And Then There Were None there. In fact, Deborah suspects it may be the Agatha Christie connection that’s earned her hotel an apparent following among lesbian tourists from Japan.

‘There’s absolutely no evidence to this at all,’ she says, ‘but I’ve always sneakily felt that Mrs Christie was a bit of a swinger. In any event, there’s a “lost week” episode when she disappeared, rumour had it, with a female friend – and frankly there must have been a bit of a spark about her.

‘The Japanese have an unerring way of seeking out oblique facts in life and I suspect this may account for the interest we’ve had. And the majority of our oriental tourists have been feisty women – it can't just be that they were taught English by reading Agatha Christie at school, can it?’

Deborah sounds keen to attract a gay clientele, and says she’s had several bookings for ceremonies since the advent of same-sex Civil Partnerships. Regarding lesbian visitors, she seems excited by the prospect of Burgh Island gaining a similar reputation to that of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West lived and had an affair with Virginia Woolf and a long-term relationship with Violet Trefusis.

Deborah and her husband Tony Orchard bought Burgh Island Hotel in 2001. Long before that, it had plenty of its own stylish, scandalous guests in the period between the World Wars. Marlene Dietrich wasn’t one of them, in case you’re wondering, but Noël Coward spent three weeks here and, according to the brochure, wrote ‘some of his most lovely songs over cocktails and winks at the waiters’. Edward VIII brought Wallis Simpson for a getaway, only to find his aide, Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, staying here.

Among its other illustrious guests, the hotel counts Coward’s friend and muse Gertrude Lawrence and aviator Amy Johnson, who stopped off en route to open Plymouth Airport in 1932.

These names now grace the hotel suites. Every room but one is a suite, and each is different from its 22 neighbours. Although their period furniture may be lived-in and a little mismatched, their 1930s-style bathrooms are a delicious composition of bevelled edges, high-falutin’ mirrors, big pipes and shiny tiles. In-keeping with the spirit of the 1930s, there’s nothing so tastelessly modern as a mini-bar or TV, nor can you get a reliable mobile phone signal here – although the Bakelite telephones sitting at every bedside are fully operational.

That’s not to say the suites lack luxury. For all the painstaking retro detail, the aim is to ‘echo the feeling of those times, not replicate it,’ says Tony. The hotel’s more luxurious than it was back then. It also has a sauna, and offers such treatments as aromatherapy, Japanese facial massage and pedicure.

With all these selling points, the hotel could skirt over food quality. Instead, chef Conor Heneghan serves up a menu based on locally caught fish and seafood, fresh seasonal vegetables, locally sourced whenever possible, and organically reared meat.

The hotel’s restoration has cost Deborah and Tony £1million. Before they took over, and since it was built in 1929, it had passed from owner to owner and there were long periods between proprietors when it stood vacant and neglected – for at least 16 out of those 72 years it was derelict.

Burgh Island’s attractions aren’t limited to just its indoor pleasures. It’s in a unique location: an island connected to the mainland of South Devon by only a causeway of sand that’s washed over twice a day by the tide. At low tide, you can walk across the beach to the rocky island, but after high tide the island is cut off, and the only way over is on the hotel’s sea tractor, a Heath Robinson-type contraption that carries its passengers through the water on elevated wheels.

The island itself is barely half a mile long, so you can walk round it in half an hour and still have time to enjoy its sea-lashed rocks, caves and windswept hillsides carpeted in wild flowers. For outdoor bathing, there’s the Mermaid Pool, an inlet of seawater enclosed by the surrounding cliffs, which you reach by a cliffside path that descends from the garden.

But perhaps the hotel’s greatest allure is its atmosphere. Deborah has ruled out murder-mystery parties, but with its island location, dressing-up ethos and history, you can understand why certain Japanese ladies believe Burgh Island is the perfect place for some decadent naughtiness.

Burgh Island Hotel
Bigbury-on-Sea,
South Devon,
TQ7 4BG.
Tel: 0044 (0)1548 810514
Email: reception@burghisland.com
Web: www.burghisland.com