The Cae Mor Hotel

Next Door to Venue Cymru, Facing the Bay

If you have tickets for Venue Cymru, the Cae Mor answers the question before you have finished asking it. Llandudno’s theatre and arena stands immediately alongside the hotel on Penrhyn Crescent, which means no drive home afterwards, no taxi queue in the rain, and no negotiating the seafront for a parking space — the hotel keeps generous parking of its own next to the building, which is more than most of this stretch can manage.

The setting would carry the hotel even without that. Penrhyn Crescent faces Llandudno Bay directly; the beach is across the promenade, the Little Orme closes the view one way and the Great Orme the other. Four-star graded, and rated 9.3 by more than fourteen hundred guests, the Cae Mor is one of the strongest performers on the front.

Inside the building

A careful renovation has left the hotel poised between the two centuries it belongs to. The lounge still turns around a Victorian fireplace; the lighting hanging above it is emphatically of our own era, and the two get along better than they have any right to. Bedrooms follow the same instinct — contemporary furniture, air conditioning, flat-screen televisions and modern en suites, set inside the tall windows and generous proportions of an 1890s seaside hotel. Take a front room and the bay, the promenade and the headland are yours from the pillow.

The 1890 restaurant

The kitchen takes its name from the year the hotel went up, and its ambitions run higher than the promenade norm: this is a fine-dining room with the water in the windows, not a carvery with a sea glimpse. Guests describe breakfast as “fabulous” — Booking.com’s second-highest band — and a coffee house handles the middle of the day. Room service is available for the evenings when the walk to the dining room feels like one flight of stairs too many.

A note on Venue Cymru

Llandudno’s theatre and arena is the reason a great many people book a hotel here at all, and its programme runs the full year — touring musicals and drama, comedy, tribute acts, conferences, exhibitions and the pantomime that fills the town every Christmas. Being able to walk out of a show and be in your room inside two minutes is worth a good deal, and it changes what the evening can be: dinner in the 1890 dining room beforehand, a drink afterwards, and no thought given to the car at all.

Penrhyn Crescent

The crescent is one of the addresses Llandudno was planned around, facing the water on the gentle curve between the two headlands. It means the hotel has the bay square in front of it rather than at an angle, which matters a great deal more than it sounds when you are sitting at a window with a pot of tea. It also means the beach is reached without crossing a main road — you step out, cross the promenade, and you are on the sand.

The bay, on foot

Turn left from the door and the promenade runs west towards the pier, the Grand Hotel and the foot of the Great Orme; turn right and it carries on east to Craig-y-Don and the Little Orme. Both are flat, both take minutes. The Victorian shopping arcades of Mostyn Street sit a short way inland behind the hotel. Conwy Castle is a brief drive along the coast road, and the Great Orme’s tramway, cable car and Bronze Age copper mines are all clustered at the western end of town.

Worth knowing

Free parking, free WiFi, a sun terrace, a garden, and facilities for guests with disabilities. Rooms open at roughly £182 a night, which puts the Cae Mor at the top end of our Llandudno hotels — you are paying for the beachfront position, the four stars and a kitchen that means it. For a show at Venue Cymru or a special weekend on the bay, that is money working hard.