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Portsmouth The first B&B in Portsmouth and still the pace-setter, this has been cosseting guests since 1978, lately under the caring eye of Margot Doering. Leaving a career in corporate lending, she purchased the inn from founders Jane and Paul Harnden in 2004 to fulfill her love of cooking and meeting people. Her guests enjoy the fruits of her cooking at breakfast around the gleaming mahogany table in the antiques-filled dining room, whose walls display coordinated English wallpapers and paints. Orange juice and a fruit course like baked pears topped with honey-vanilla cream cheese are preliminaries. Margot alternates sweet and savory dishes each morning, so ginger pancakes with homemade applesauce might be followed by a southwest omelet with biscuits accented with cayenne pepper. The coffee flows as guests discuss culinary topics and trade restaurant suggestions with Margot, who knows her stuff. Her hospitality is apparent in the rooms and suites, which are spread across the handsome yellow main house dating to 1815 and in an adjacent guest house of 1850 vintage to the side and rear. To encourage guests to mingle, she converted the downstairs front room to mixed use: a guest room in summer and a parlor with game tables in winter. She continued to shun television anywhere in the B&B, seeking instead to create a quiet spot for “relaxation and old-fashioned inter-action.” Although the inn lacks a common room in summer, guests have plenty of room to spread out in three spacious guest rooms in the main house, plus a room and three suites in the adjacent guest house. Besides the Library/Parlor on the main floor, the upstairs Master Bedroom is formal in white and wedgwood blue, with a plush curtained and canopied queensize poster bed, a large English mahogany armoire, and oriental rugs on the wide-board floors. The Greenhouse Suite in the spiffy side guest house contains a small solarium furnished in wicker looking onto the outdoor courtyard, rattan furniture in an inside sitting room and a queensize bedroom with full bath. Balloon curtains frame the windows in the second-floor Green Room, which has a small sitting room, an antique tub with a hand-held shower, and a queensize iron and brass bed. All rooms have modern baths, loveseats or comfortable chairs, good reading lamps, writing desks, armoires, and nice touches like assorted hard candies in china teacups and the inn's own wildflower glycerin soaps. Guests find a shady oasis for relaxation in the deep back yard, where 400 plants thrive and a water garden with a gurgling fountain is illuminated at night. The yard, surrounded by cedar fencing, was featured one year in the Unitarian Church's annual pocket garden tour.
(603) 436-2287. E-mail: reservations@martinhillinn.com. For more information: www.martinhillinn.com
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