I'm with you on that one. I'd say, for example, "We went to a lovely little park", rather than "a little lovely park." The second sounds wrong for some reason.
Not a native speaker, but "a little lovely" kinda sounds like an opposite to "much lovely".
That is, my parsing of "a little lovely park" is ambiguous between "a little (lovely park)" and "a (little lovely) park". With "a lovely little park" there is no ambiguity.
