Janine Ottley
Google
This hotel is beautiful in the small town of Lillesand. This town is very small, so we were happy to find a place to stay here.
The building is historical, and it's old. There have obviously been renovations, the breakfast room and the parlors are beautiful. Though we made this reservation 3 months prior, we were put in the addition to the hotel, so we had to carry our luggage through the entire parlor, into the hallway, through a glass door, and up spiral stairs. We packed light, but still.
We were in a 2nd floor room, and had a window overlooking the street. There were cars who loved to share how loud their exhaust could be, which was surprising in such a small town, so we listened that late into the night and early the next morning.
The location is perfect, they have parking attached to their hotel but it was full, so we were invited to park across the small street but only until 10am the next morning, then we'd have to move. I'm not sure where we would have gone, but we were checking out anyway, so it didn't matter. I assume we could have paid to park there after 10am?
The rooms have zero air conditioning (not a huge surprise) but I was surprised there were no fans. We were experiencing a very rainy storm, but the day we arrived, it had cleared up and was maybe 70˚ F and sunny. This made the room very warm, with no air circulation. I wonder what people do in warmer weather?
The bed was an IKEA mattress, which I did not expect. It was as comfortable as I expected an IKEA foam mattress to be (3-4" thick).
Our breakfast was in the dining room which was charming and beautiful. We were asked what time we'd like to have breakfast and we were 5 minutes behind that time when we arrived. We sat at a table for two and were brought a 3 tiered tea tray full of fruit, pastries, yogurt, eggs, salmon, etc. It was charming and the breakfast was good.
Overall we enjoyed our stay, I would have liked a fan, a quieter room, parking we didn't have to worry about, and a room that wasn't such a trek, but I know many of those things are out of the hotel's control. The bed and the fan, however, are things, for the price paid, I feel they could improve on.