I don’t care how small the £19 hotel room is. It’s heaven to me

My ultimate fantasy takes place in a hotel room. I pad down a quiet corridor, the silence only broken by the trundle and click of the wheelie case I drag behind me. I open a heavy door, throw the case to the floor, strip down to my underwear, hurl myself onto the bed … and that’s it. Some versions of the fantasy involve a family-sized bag of barbecue Kettle Chips. In others I turn on the television and discover a channel that is running a back-to-back viewing marathon of Grand Designs. That’s probably the best one.

There’s nothing nicer than being sealed into your own secure, private space, Swiss-rolled into fresh, clean bed linen, while you watch a pair of idiots borrowing millions of pounds to live in a leaky caravan on a building site.

I love hotels. Whether they’re huge or humble, every single room feels like a grown-up theme park to me. Nothing thrills me more than having to stay in a hotel for work. Perhaps pathetically, it feels like a validation of my professional existence. I’ve stayed at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and sipped $30 room-service hot chocolate in the bath at 4am. I’ve stayed in a tiny, windowless room in Blackpool – and only realised on checking out, when a man was waiting impatiently outside the door with a battalion of brooms and buckets, that I’d spent the night in a cleaning supplies cupboard. Both felt like adventures. So I hope to find the opportunity to stay in one of the new “keenly priced” Premier Inn Zip hotels. I’m not sure that it’s fair to describe it as a “no frills” chain, though. It might be basic, but every hotel room can be luxurious if, like me, you’re easily pleased and have an overactive imagination.

Take room service. While I will pay over the odds to eat almost anything that has been wheeled in on a trolley and covered with a large silver dome, even the smartest hotels sometimes send up woolly chips, depressed lettuce and a sandwich that appears to have been made in a Breville that recently celebrated its centenary. All anyone ever wants from a room-service dinner is something hot and calorific that can be eaten in bed, late at night, in their pants. If you’ve got a phone, and can ring for a takeaway, you’ve got a full room-service menu. The Zip will seem a lot less basic if you think of it as a late-night hotspot for eclectic local cuisine.

Zip rooms are less than half the size of Premier Inn rooms, and it appears that almost all the space will be occupied by beds and the bathroom. Anyone who has ever lived in a houseshare and fallen over in the dark while searching for their pyjama bottoms will testify that there are few experiences more luxurious than being able to reach a flushing toilet within seconds of leaving your bed. Also, I am privileged enough to be able to tell you that there are few experiences more distressing than staying in a vast country hotel, stubbing your toe on an antique sideboard and then realising – just in time – that the bathroom is actually an enormous wardrobe. As long as you don’t have to bring your own loo roll, I will pay the Zip people a premium for the tininess of the en suite.

Then there is the Very Small Shampoo. It is my understanding that in the 1980s, when business travel was relatively new and glamorous, the tiny shampoo took on the significance of hunting trophies. Instead of mounting a stag’s head on your wall, you filled your bathroom with thimble-sized bottles of Molton Brown, to show your guests how well you were doing at life.

However, times have changed. The appetite for tiny toiletries has taken a hit, as they’re no longer associated with the high-roller lifestyle, but with punitive airport security rules. Who among us hasn’t spent all their holiday money in Boots before getting on a plane, buying deodorant in quantities that would fail to keep an ant fresh? Still, the upside is that if you really want an old-fashioned, high-end hotel experience, you can get it from almost any high-street chemist. If you’re a fellow sybarite, you can buy an Asprey Purple Water gift set, containing the toiletries you’d find in your bathroom if you were staying at the Ritz. The smallest room I could find at the Ritz costs £395. I reckon you could recreate the experience at the Zip and be at least £300 up.

Most importantly, the best part of any hotel stay is solitude. When you shut the door, you create a solid boundary between yourself and the rest of the world. For £19, that boundary stays in place. No one is going to walk in uninvited with extra towels or chocolates for your pillow. The Zip would be a great place for a silent retreat. In 2018, when everyone seems to be increasingly stressed and overwhelmed, peace and quiet usually comes at a premium. Less is more. If you can take a mini holiday from your responsibilities and spend a quiet night in a room with nothing but a bed in it, and get change from a £20 note, I suspect you’re getting more for less.

• Daisy Buchanan is a columnist and features writer