It’s not entirely surprising that the man who came up with the quirky Hip Hotels books has an unconventional CV. Herbert Ypma was brought up on three continents, dropped out of college to become a professional windsurfer, and founded and edited an interior design magazine, despite having absolutely no formal qualification in either interior design or magazines. Then, 15 years ago, he came up with the idea for Hip Hotels (the Hip stands for Highly Individual Places) after stumbling across an undiscovered gem of a hotel in India. It is, to say the least, an unorthodox career.

The first Hip Hotels book was published in 1999. Since then, they have become the armchair staple of everyone from young urban types who line them up on their shelves (they’re all 256 pages long to maximise shelf-appeal), to people who like to tick off the hotels as they visit, and middle-aged couples trying to shake up their holiday routine. Ypma’s big idea was to group hotels by genre, not necessarily location, as well as to seek out the unusual. Hip Hotels, he reckoned, were travel experiences you could stay in. Publishers were unimpressed.

“They didn’t get it,” he says, over a Guinness in his local. “They’d say, ‘Is it a coffee-table book or a guide book? You can’t be both. You do a book on San Francisco and people who are going to San Francisco buy it. You can’t do a book on a bunch of hotels all over the world.”

Ypma’s gut instinct was that you could. He was right: the 14 Hip Hotels books have sold 1.2 million copies worldwide, been translated into eight languages and cover everything from Hip Hotels Beach to Ski, Budget and Spa. He takes all the photographs and writes the copy longhand, with a fountain pen, in a Smythson notebook. Hip Hotels UK, the usual beguiling mix of glossy photos and chatty prose, will be added to the list in May. He says there are plenty more in the pipeline – for a start, he hasn’t got round to doing Russia or Central America.

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• Slideshow: Herbert Ypma's favourite UK hip hotels

As to why he’s only just got round to doing the UK, where he lives part of the time, Ypma says it’s because only recently has it become a viable subject. “When Hip Hotels started there were only three or four hotels you could say were Highly Individual Places, but now there are enough to fill a book.”

Having driven 6,000 miles in six weeks to put it together, Ypma came to the conclusion that the hippest places in Britain are gastropubs-with-rooms such as the Star Inn at Harome in North Yorkshire, and what he calls the “groovy grands”: old, formal country houses like Cowley Manor, or Moccas Court, which have chucked out the chintz and been given a modern, super-comfortable make-over.

“You can throw a really funky piece of furniture into a Georgian house and it looks fantastic. You can take the view of the countryside and the sloshing round in your wellies culture and mix it with a wood-burning pizza oven and a kitchen that serves breakfast till 5pm.” (Ypma’s personal favourites are the Hotel Endsleigh in Devon, Hell Bay in the Scilly Isles, Cowley Manor and Babington.)

UK hotels, he says, have changed “hugely”, with the biggest change in the countryside, where the market is buoyant, he believes, partly because of London’s strength as a global financial centre, but also because of the wearying realisation that any break that begins in an airport is better avoided. (He also credits global warming with improving British weather to the point where people think they can escape into the countryside with a fair chance of not being rained on.) “All of a sudden, possibly led by the example of Babington, people have gone, ‘Hey, these Georgian boxes with their stables and outbuildings make really great hotels.’”

It’s this unique architecture which Ypma thinks makes a hip hotel here different. “Only in the UK can you find Georgian country houses that have been converted spectacularly into hotels,” he says. “The same applies to the whole notion of a gastropub: a cosy pub nestled into the countryside with open fires is a very English idea.”

Hip hotels like these embody Ypma’s original meaning of “hip”: highly individual places. “I don’t care whether it’s the location or the design, or that the owners are crazy, or that it’s in a wacky place. The point is, that’s what travel is: it leaves you with stories.”

Hotels like this, he reckons, cater for a new breed of customer: someone who isn’t interested in spending a weekend in the country hunting, shooting and fishing, but who is interested in having a flat-screen TV in the bathroom, a bed the size of Cheshire and someone else to cook dinner. To those who say that some hotels in the UK book aren’t exactly unheard of – Babington House, Inverlochy Castle – Ypma’s response is that it doesn’t matter how many people have been there before him, what matters is his unique take.

Life for Ypma, a youthful blond 49-year-old in a blue shirt with frayed cuffs, looks uncannily like one long holiday. The reality is a punishing schedule of six months a year on the road, on his own, in a different hotel every night. He travels in two or three week chunks and, fortunately, is happy with his own company: his idea of luxury is a spacious hotel room to himself, a room service burger and a DVD.