Hotels

Paris has close to 40 public swimming pools, but only one of them has a novel's protagonist named after it, hosted the debut of the bikini, and spent more than two decades as an abandoned canvas for graffiti artists before reopening as a five-star hotel. The Molitor, on the western …

Millions of people pour into Switzerland's Jungfrau region every year, and almost all of them stick to the same handful of villages and viewpoints. Berghotel Obersteinberg is not one of them. To get here you climb 850 vertical meters (2,790 feet) above Stechelberg on foot, since no road, cable car, …

There's a hill in the middle of Finnish farmland where, if you weren't told otherwise, you'd assume a plane had crash-landed. It hasn't. A decommissioned Saab 340B passenger aircraft sits there deliberately, wingless, fitted out with beds, a sauna, and a working set of cockpit controls you're actually allowed to …

There's a version of "eco resort" that means a few solar panels and a sign about towel reuse. Ulaman is not that. This is a place where the walls are literally compressed earth, the staircases are woven bamboo, and there's a hand-carved wine cave hidden behind a stone wall that …

A hotel got shot in the crossfire of a presidential scandal, hosted the first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and somehow still manages to feel like the calmest place on one of the world's loudest beaches. That's Copacabana Palace in a nutshell: a century-old Art Deco block …

There are wildlife encounters, and then there's watching a family of wild elephants amble straight through a hotel reception on their way to raid a mango tree. At Mfuwe Lodge, in Zambia's South Luangwa National Park, this isn't a staged photo opportunity or a rare fluke. It's an annual event …

At Shanghai Snow World Hotel, you can ski-in, ski-out, and still make your teppanyaki reservation by 7pm - no mountain required. The hotel sits inside a vast climate-controlled dome in Pudong, where the snow is real, the slopes are certified by Guinness World Records, and your room door opens directly …

In the far southeastern corner of Utah, where the Colorado Plateau breaks apart into red rock and silence, a resort sits pressed against 60-meter (200-foot) sandstone cliffs as though it has always been there. Bluff Dwellings Resort & Spa is 10 buildings and 56 rooms stacked and weathered-looking against the …

Dundgovi Province in southern Mongolia is not on most people's radar, which is precisely the point. The Gobi Desert here is vast, dry, and almost completely silent - a semi-arid steppe that nomads have traditionally called the "Steppe to Get Lost." Gobi Caravanserai sits in the middle of it, next …

There's a lake in Morocco that most travelers never find. Bin El Ouidane sits in the Middle Atlas foothills, roughly three and a half hours from both Marrakech and Casablanca, its water an improbable shade of blue against a backdrop of olive groves, argan trees, and cactus-covered hillsides. Perched on …

There are plenty of hotels that claim to put you in touch with a place's culture. Hotel Qvevrebi in eastern Georgia takes the idea more literally than most: it has built 20 cottages shaped like the qvevri, the ancient egg-shaped clay vessels that Georgians have used to ferment and store …

In 1973, Ricardo Bofill completed a residential building on the cliffs of Calpe that was so visually arresting it would take the internet fifty years to fully lose its mind over it. Its labyrinthine staircases inspired the set designers of Squid Game. Its rooftop pool, painted in shades of cobalt …

There are places you visit and places that visit you back. Aura House, a hand-shaped bamboo structure curling along the edge of Bali's Ayung River gorge, belongs firmly in the second category. It was designed by IBUKU, the architecture collective founded by Elora Hardy - daughter of Canadian jewelry entrepreneur …

Most hotels put considerable energy into helping you sleep. Blackout curtains, pillow menus, turndown service - the whole apparatus of hospitality exists, in large part, to knock you unconscious as efficiently as possible. Manga Art Hotel Tokyo has a different ambition. Located on the upper floors of a building in …

Langkawi has no shortage of places to stay. There are clifftop resorts with infinity pools, beachfront villas with butler service, and boutique guesthouses tucked into the jungle. None of them look like a coconut. On the eastern edge of the island, in a sheltered cape called Tanjung Rhu where mangrove …

You can hear them before you can see them. Somewhere past the darkened tree line, beyond the torchlit pathways and the hush of a zoo without crowds, a lion roars. Then another. The sound is visceral and close enough to make your chest tighten - and when you realize the …

Between Fribourg's medieval rooftops and a park full of century-old beeches, a renovated 17th-century manor is doing something quietly remarkable. Auberge aux 4 Vents is not a boutique hotel in the algorithmic sense - all reclaimed wood and oat milk. It is something older and stranger: a patrician country manor …

Somewhere in the Charente countryside of southwest France, on a 1,000-hectare (2,500-acre) estate of forests, lakes, and open pastureland, there is a tennis court floating on a pond. There is also a 13th-century castle tower where you can sleep beneath a glass ceiling and look up at the stone ribs …

The reception desk at ZERO Box Lodge in Coimbra is a motorbike. The check-in process involves a cold beer, handed to you on arrival, and the quiet suggestion that the best thing you can do now is go outside. The rooms are stripped back by design - no windows, no …

Sweets Hotel Machida is exactly what it sounds like, and absolutely nothing like what you'd expect. Sitting in suburban Tokyo, this 19-room love hotel has committed so completely to its confectionery concept - chocolate baths, shell-shaped beds, a mermaid aquarium - that the result lands somewhere between a fever dream …