The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, and this is more apt than you can know.
Inside there is faded Victorian grandeur mashed with Arthurian legend mashed with Kazakh oil baron chic mashed with three-star hotel in fading south coast resort. There is sinister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets, staff dressed for serving tea at some ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from every window, the sea. It is so disorientating — I am used to smooth, grey, efficient hotels — the result is thrilling. It is so weird, like tumbling into cinema. What might happen at the Overlook — I mean the Camelot Castle — Hotel?
The owners are the artist Ted Stourton and John Mappin of the Queen’s jewellers, who is, among other things, a fanatical Donald Trump fan.
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