Strattons Hotel, Norfolk

It's hardly rocket science. Grow your own salad and you save £1,000 a year; cut down on waste and you won't have to fork out so much on contractors and industrial bins; buy local produce and you'll find favour with the village. That's according to Vanessa Scott, co-owner of Strattons Hotel and Restaurant in Swaffham, Norfolk, which yesterday was awarded the Sustainability Award in the annual Enjoy England Awards for Excellence.

Yet the surprising thing about Strattons is that it's not your usual socks-and-sandals green bolthole. It's a 10-room country hotel in a Grade II-listed Queen Anne villa with canopied four-poster beds, open fires, stripped wooden floorboards and free-standing baths. Strattons Hotel and Restaurant, Norfolk.
Photo: Richard Hammond.

The hotel made it into the first Mr&Mrs Smith UK boutique hotel guide and you're just as likely to see it featured on the glossy pages of Country Living as on the chlorine-free pages of the Ecologist.

Guests come as much for the award-winning food as they do for the luxury accommodation (the restaurant was this year's East of England winner in the Taste of England awards). It serves only local, seasonal and organic food – "wherever possible" (which is genuine). For dinner, I had smoked mackerel from Cley, cheese from Swaffham's market washed down with beer from the Brecks.

England's tourism Oscars introduced the new sustainability award this year to reflect the growing number of green places to stay. So what makes Strattons a green cut above the rest?

"We focus on waste," Scott told me. Which sounded ridiculously bland until I found out exactly what she meant by "focus". Once guests have checked out of their rooms, her staff swoop in to rifle through the bins to see what can be recycled, given to charity, or thrown on the compost. Almost everything is given a new home: magazines are sent off to doctor's waiting rooms, carrier bags are given to the local village market traders, organic food waste is used to fertilise the vegetable garden. What's left is then weighed to assess how much rubbish is produced. According to Scott, just 2% of the hotel's total waste is sent to landfill.

It may verge on the obsessive, but Strattons' private war on waste is typical of the kind of attention to detail that wins green awards. It has fitted its toilet cisterns with "hippos" made from recycled plastic bottles, which saves 20% water on every flush; there are refillable pump dispensers in the bathrooms instead of luxury miniatures; and if you hang your towel on the rail to signal you don't want it washing, the next day there'll be a message thanking you for bothering, and a note telling you how much water and energy you have saved.

Just as Strattons sets the green standard for boutique hotels, the other joint winner in the Excellence for England awards – a 12-room 17th-century forester's cottage in the New Forest - is flying the green flag for family-run B&Bs. It's a mixture of the old and the new; the low-ceilinged rooms in the old part of the cottage (constructed in 1650 from reclaimed ships' timbers, handmade bricks and sand) have more character than the rooms in the modern annexe, which face on to patio gardens. The Cottage Lodge
doesn't match Strattons for quality, but it mirrors its commitment to all things green. It's just five minutes' walk from Brockenhurst train station, and I was given free tea and scones for arriving by train; everything in my full English breakfast was sourced from within 10 miles of the lodge, and there are all the usual green things like thick insulation and eco-friendly cleaning products. None of it is rocket science; they just do the simple green things well.

A room at Strattons cost from £150 (10% discount if you arrive by public transport), three-course dinner £40 (strattonshotel.com; +44 (0)1760 723845).

A room at The Cottage Lodge costs from £50 B&B (cottagelodge.co.uk; +44 (0)1590 622296).

Enjoy England Awards for Excellence 2008: enjoyengland.com

This article, by Richard Hammond, was first published in the Guardian.