Boutique hotel in 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.

Strattons Hotel and Restaurant, Norfolk.
Photo: Richard Hammond

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. 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.

Not exactly rocket science is it? Strattons just do the simple green things well. And it's a fabulous place to stay.

See the listing for Strattons on greentraveller.