Good design is not always revolutionary, but often evolutionary. Nor is high spending a prerequisite for good design. Good design needs a client with faith and vision, a willingness to take risks, and ambition.

One common factor in all types of hotel keeping is that everything moves up-market, expectations rise as technology changes the world we live in - but guests stay the same and may not be as upmarket as their expectations. Nevertheless their experience teaches them to have high expectations of their holiday destinations, and if you are in the holiday market then you have to stand and deliver - or die.

Meanwhile along the road from the earlier entrance, a still earlier part has been transformed into the 'new' entrance. Roll over to see it internally with the specialist joinery on the Reception and Concierge desks carrying the trademark bowl of apples (another hotel is called the Pomme d'Or)

For over eight decades there has been a hotel on this site. Many incarnations have seen the marks of the years left on both the exterior and the interior – the work of designers of different times, differing aesthetics, remain, reused, undisguised, but still faithful to the vision of the family that have driven the process and the history of change.

Never was it just one building. Altered, merged, rebuilt, demolished, reoriented, enlarged. Across the road, down the hill, up the hill, along the road, it has been steadily developed through three generations, through depression, war and occupation, liberation, recession, years of plenty, the youth revolution, baby boomers into the era of mass tourism and the Internet.

Yet still it wins awards. Still it generates profits and still it remains a testament to a vision – the vision of not one Client, but of a family; of not one designer but many; of not one builder but generations of builders. Now over 300 bedrooms surround an Arcadian space, scented blooms competing with the smell of the sea. The cries of gulls compete with the laughter of adults and children. Sometimes the beat of rock’n’roll can be heard again from the dance floor, or the plaintive wail of a country and western lament from the jukebox in Jersey Joes; the nightclub somehow is never heard, whilst the tat-a-tat-tat of electronic gunfire comes from the Games Zone (“the most expensive area in the Resort”, commented one dad ruefully).