A coaching inn hotel in Corbeck Wells

The inn is more than three hundred years old, with three floors added to and rearranged over time. It has twenty-two bedrooms and a bar that fills on Friday evenings.

Old buildings do not make assessors nervous. They make them slow. We walked each floor twice, once as an assessor and once as a guest arriving late and a little lost. The second walk found what the first did not: a curtain hung over an exit door to keep out a draught, so that a guest would not see it as a door at all.

The wing door was heavy, and the staff propped it open because carrying luggage through it is hard. We heard that explanation several times. The answer was a release unit, which does the job the trolley was doing without the risk.

The owners were quick. The luggage room was cleared the following week, and the curtain went to the cleaner’s that afternoon. Because guests sleep here, the next visit comes sooner than it would in an office.