Here is a question worth asking about every grand house above Windermere, and there are dozens of them: who was it built for? Ask it along this shore and the answers come back much the same — a Manchester merchant, a Liverpool shipowner, a mill family with money to turn into mountain views. The railway reached Windermere in 1847, the industrial north discovered it could get to the Lakes before dinner, and for the next sixty years the hillsides filled with the houses of men who had done well somewhere smokier.
Somebody had to build all of that. On this side of the lake, very often, it was one local firm: G.H. Pattinson of Windermere, builders. Their houses stand all along the eastern shore — solid, handsome, beautifully made, each one raised for somebody else's fortune and somebody else's view.
Then, in 1900, the Pattinsons built one more. Not for a merchant. Not for a mill owner. For themselves — on a hilltop above Bowness that the builder, of all people, was best placed to know was the finest site left on the lake. The man who spent his working life framing other men's views finally kept one.
You are sleeping in it. And the family who built it turn out to have one of the best stories on the lake — a story that starts with bricks, takes to the air, and ends up in a museum you can visit before lunch. Pour something good; this takes about nine minutes.
The house was born with a different name. The Pattinsons called it Burns House — a burn being a small stream, which suggests a spring rising somewhere on the hill — and it was a modest thing by the standards of the shore below: five bedrooms, built as a family summer home rather than a statement. The family would decamp up the hill for the season and spend it the way you would hope — lazy days at the water's edge, walking and riding through the fells. In 1908 they added a billiard room, a proper big one. You will very likely have dinner in it: that extension is where Henrock now stands.
Within a decade the house had taken the older name of its hill. A thwaite, in the old languages of the Lakes, is a clearing cut from the trees, and lin is flax — so Linthwaite is the flax clearing, a name that was on this hillside centuries before anyone thought to build on it. A family photograph from 1909 survives, captioned simply “Florence on landing at Linthwaite” — a girl of the family, paused on the staircase. The staircase is still there, and so are the stained-glass windows near the entrance and the fireplaces. When you come down to breakfast you are using her banister.
The Pattinsons sold the house in 1918, after nearly twenty years of summers. On its own that is an unremarkable line in a property record — a family selling a summer house at the end of a war that had rearranged everybody's life. But hold the date, because of what else the family was doing that year.
On 10 May 1918, a flying boat rose off the North Sea with a Windermere man at the controls: Cooper Pattinson, a son of this building family, who had joined the Royal Naval Air Service and taken his lake-bred feel for water into the air. Over the Heligoland Bight, off the German coast, his flying boat — he called her Black Bess — caught a Zeppelin and shot it down. For that he became one of the first men ever awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal so new it was barely out of its box. Six days later he set what was then the war's endurance record for a flying boat: nine hours and forty-five minutes in the air, hunting submarines.
So picture the family in that strange armistice year, signing away the summer house where a boy had spent his holidays messing about at the water's edge — while that same boy, now a decorated captain, had just written himself into the history of flight. The house's first chapter closes exactly as the family's most remarkable one opens. And Cooper was not finished with the lake. Not remotely.
Jump forward to the Second World War, and Windermere — improbably — became an aircraft factory. At White Cross Bay, a few miles up the shore, Short Brothers built a plant where Sunderland flying boats were assembled and test-flown off the lake itself: thirty-five of them built between 1942 and 1944, great white whales of aeroplanes lumbering off the water where the steamers now potter.
And there, in September 1942, aboard the very first Windermere-built Sunderland on its maiden trial flight, was Cooper Pattinson — now in his fifties, the old Zeppelin hunter back over his home water. The following February he went one better, and odder. He had helped convert a glider to take off from water — the hull rebuilt in the family firm's own workshops in Windermere — and on 3 February 1943 he flew it, towed up off the lake behind a speedboat driven, the record notes with a straight face, by Lady Craven. The Water Glider, they called it. It remains one of the strangest aircraft ever to fly in this country, and it survives: it hangs today from the ceiling of Windermere Jetty Museum, ten minutes from where you are staying. The builder's son, it turned out, could not stop building either — he just preferred his projects airborne.
The house itself, meanwhile, kept its head down. After 1918 it changed hands several times and stayed out of the history books — the good kind of nothing, as these stories go — until 1969, when it was bought and opened as a guesthouse. Still with its original five bedrooms, half a century on: the house had simply not grown.
Its owners through the seventies and eighties changed that gently, adding six rooms and, more importantly, buying the adjoining land — which is how the hotel came by its tarn. The little lake in the woods, the one with the rowing boats, was not dug for anybody's pleasure: it began life as the reservoir for Storrs Hall, the mansion down on the shore. A working piece of Victorian plumbing, promoted to ornament. Row across it before dinner and you are boating on another house's water supply, which is the sort of promotion most of us would take.
From 1990 the house was owned and steadily grown by a couple who gave it thirty years of ambition — a conservatory, new wings, the room count climbing from eleven to eighteen to thirty, and four AA Red Stars along the way. By the new century the modest five-bedroom summer house had become, plank by plank, one of the lake's serious hotels. Every owner since 1969 has added something; almost nobody has taken anything away. The house that the builders built has never really stopped being built.
The current chapter opened in April 2016, when the house was bought by Analjit Singh, an Indian businessman whose small collection of hotels began in the winelands of South Africa. His surname means lion, and leeu is lion in Afrikaans — hence the Leeu Collection, which made Linthwaite its first English house and then spent a reported twelve million pounds and two years on it, reopening in 2018. That is where today's house comes from: the interiors, the sculpture scattered through the fourteen acres, the art on every wall from the owner's own collection, and six suites hidden in the trees by the tarn.
The following autumn the food caught up with the rooms. Henrock opened in October 2019 under Simon Rogan — the chef whose L'Enclume, over in Cartmel, is one of the most decorated restaurants in the country — and it is named for Hen Holme, the rocky islet out in the lake that you can pick out from the terrace. So the restaurant sits in the Pattinsons' 1908 billiard room, and is named after a view the family knew by heart. In 2025 Michelin gave the hotel a Key — the hotel world's equivalent of a star — and its inspectors singled out the one thing this story has been about from the first paragraph: the setting. There is more on what that award means, and who else here holds one, in our guide to the Lake District's Michelin Key hotels.
And the Pattinsons? Here the story turns from good to genuinely moving. Cooper's son George grew up in the family building trade — a local builder, like his people before him — but his passion was the lake's boats. He had watched Windermere's golden age of steam die around him: the elegant Victorian launches, built for the same merchant families whose houses his firm had raised, were being broken up, abandoned, or quietly scuttled. So he started saving them. Some he bought; some he raised from the bottom of the lakes with divers — including Dolly, brought up in 1962 after sixty-seven years underwater, and now recognised as one of the oldest mechanically powered boats in the world.
In 1977 George Pattinson opened the Windermere Steamboat Museum on the shore between Bowness and Windermere to hold the collection, and insisted the boats be kept afloat, steaming, on the water they were built for. That collection — forty vessels now, from Beatrix Potter's rowing boat to the launch that inspired Captain Flint's houseboat in Swallows and Amazons — is today the heart of Windermere Jetty Museum, reopened in 2019 in its handsome new buildings on the same site. The then Prince of Wales opened the museum in 1977; forty-two years later, the same man came back and launched its successor.
Stand back and look at what this one family gave the lake. The grandfather's generation built its houses. Cooper flew from its water in two world wars. George saved its boats for everybody, forever. Most families who made money out of Windermere took their view and closed the gate; the family who built this house spent a century quietly handing the lake back. If you do one thing beyond the hotel gates, make it the Jetty — it is ten minutes away, the Water Glider is hanging from the ceiling, and the whole place is, in a real sense, this house's family album.
So that is the house you are sleeping in: not an aristocrat's seat, not a merchant's statement, but the builder's own — the one house on this shore raised by the people who raised all the others, on the hill they knew was best because knowing was their trade. Five bedrooms then, thirty-six now; Burns House then, Linthwaite now; and through every name and every owner, the same unarguable asset, the one thing no refurbishment has ever needed to touch. The view was the point in 1900. Michelin's inspectors said much the same thing a century and a quarter later. Some judgements just hold.
Enjoy your stay. And if, some morning on that terrace, you find yourself wanting the stories behind everything else you can see — we're local, we collect at the door, and this is what we do.
A note on the family thread: the hotel's history records the house as built and owned by G.H. Pattinson; Cooper Pattinson's biographers record G.H. Pattinson of Windermere as his family's firm, and George Pattinson OBE as Cooper's son. We have told it as one family story because the record supports it — but the connection runs through the family building firm, and we would rather say so plainly than imply a document that names every link.
Lake District Tours is an independent, family-run tour company based in Kendal, not affiliated with Linthwaite House or the Leeu Collection — this history is our own research, told the way we tell it on tour.
Staying on the hill, or planning to?
The house was built in 1900 by the Pattinson family — the Windermere building firm of G.H. Pattinson, whose houses line the eastern shore of the lake. It was originally called Burns House, and the family used it as their summer home until it was sold in 1918.
No. It was a private house until 1918, then passed through several hands before becoming a five-bedroom guesthouse in 1969. It grew steadily from there — eleven rooms, then eighteen, then thirty — and after a complete refurbishment by its current owners it reopened in 2018 with thirty-six rooms.
Three generations of the family shaped the lake. G.H. Pattinson's firm built many of the grand houses above Windermere. Cooper Pattinson DFC flew flying boats in both world wars and launched the Water Glider from the lake in 1943. His son George Pattinson OBE rescued the lake's Victorian steamboats and founded the Windermere Steamboat Museum in 1977 — its collection is now at Windermere Jetty Museum.
It holds one Michelin Key, which is the hotel equivalent of a star, awarded for the stay itself. Its restaurant, Henrock, is part of the Simon Rogan group but does not itself hold a Michelin Star — Michelin awards Keys and Stars independently.
In the old languages of the Lakes, a thwaite is a clearing cut from the trees, and lin is flax — so Linthwaite is the flax clearing, a name for this hillside far older than the house. The house itself was actually born as Burns House in 1900, and took the older name of its hill within a decade.