OPUL EXPRESS - Inglewood

Inglewood is a guest house in a cream-rendered Victorian terrace on Queens Promenade, its name spelled out in steel letters across the front and a chalkboard for the Opul bar propped by the door.

You come up off the pavement between two rendered columns into a black-framed doorway, past window boxes of petunias and low black railings. Some of the rooms above the bay look straight out across the water.

The dining room under the clocks

The ground floor opens into a dining room laid up with dark high-backed leather chairs around wooden tables, white china at every place and a rack of preserves in the middle. A collection of wall clocks hangs above a small servery counter, bookshelves run along one side, and there is a lounge of red armchairs beyond it.

Pine headboards and buttoned leather

Rooms are done in warm creams over patterned carpet, with pine bed frames and, in most, a buttoned brown leather sofa or a tub chair by the window. There are doubles, twins made up with a pair of singles, one larger room holding four single beds, and a suite split across two rooms. Each has its own bathroom, a desk, a flat-screen and a kettle beside the bed. Most bathrooms hold a tiled shower enclosure; one has a roll-top bath under a window. The upper floors are reached by stairs.

Palms, railings and the curve of the bay

Queens Promenade runs along the front of the house, and across it there is grass, a stand of palms and the black seafront railings above the sand. Douglas Beach is right there, and the promenade carries on round into the centre of Douglas. Sunsets seen through those palms are what guests photograph most.

Who ends up at Inglewood

People over for a few nights who would rather find somebody at a desk than a key safe in a porch. The spread of doubles, twins and the four-bed room also suits a group travelling together who want one roof over all of them.