Hotels

Maison Mystique does not announce itself. It accumulates - vine-draped archways, a hidden whisky lounge behind a door that gives nothing away, glass domes of preserved butterflies frozen mid-flutter - until the place stops feeling like a hotel and starts feeling like a house that has been quietly waiting for …

You cross an active airport runway to get there. The building you're sleeping in was built in Malaysia and transported across the ocean on a ship. Barbary macaque monkeys live on the limestone rock looming outside your window. And you're permanently at sea - except you're not, because the vessel …

There are no light switches at Feynan Ecolodge. No minibar, no television, no electricity sockets in the rooms. What you get instead is candlelight flickering off stone walls, a sky so dense with stars it feels structural, and the sound of nothing in particular. Located deep inside Jordan's Dana Biosphere …

There are plenty of reasons to visit Norway in winter. But most of them involve heading north - to Tromsø, to Finnmark, to the kind of latitudes where the aurora borealis is practically a nightly obligation. What fewer people know is that some of Norway's most quietly extraordinary winter experiences …

There's a building in the Catalan countryside that spent eleven centuries refusing to fall. The Castle of Cardona, perched on a rocky promontory 460 meters (1,500 feet) above the walled town below, repelled Bourbon armies, outlasted Napoleonic sieges, and withstood the Carlists during the Spanish Civil War. Today, it's a …

The road in has 29 switchbacks and occasionally gets buried by snowstorms. The walls are covered in autographed photos of skiing legends. There are no televisions in the rooms. And yet people come back here, year after year, for generations. Hotel Portillo, the iconic yellow and blue fortress perched at …

Somewhere between your second dip in a thermal pool and watching the sun dissolve into the Tyrrhenian Sea, Ischia stops feeling like a place you're visiting and starts feeling like somewhere you might never want to leave. San Montano Resort & Spa has a way of doing that to people. …

There's a moment, sometime between your first glass of Pessac-Léognan and your third hour of doing absolutely nothing by an indoor pool, when Les Sources de Caudalie stops feeling like a hotel and starts feeling suspiciously like someone's very beautiful home that you've been allowed to borrow for a few …

Another Place, The Machrie does not announce itself. It accumulates - a golden eagle banking over the Atlantic, a genuine Tracey Emin hanging next to your breakfast table - until the place stops feeling like a hotel and starts feeling like a very convincing dream. Set on the Isle of …

There's a button on the door of your room at Huus Quell that cuts the Wi-Fi. It's a small thing, but it tells you everything about what Jan Schoch is going for here. The founder of Switzerland's first tech unicorn, a former Goldman Sachs man who spent years on Wall …

There's a hotel in Copenhagen where the walls once held the weight of six million liters of beer. Where a curved light installation trails down from ceiling to bar like a vertebral column, and where 64 golden discs on the facade each represent the bottom of a beer bottle. Where, …

There's a building at Hyde Park Corner that looks like it's trying to set sail. All glass and steel outriggers, semi-suspended on anti-vibration bearings to absorb the tremors of the Piccadilly Line rumbling underneath - it's one of the last projects from the late architect Richard Rogers, the man behind …

There is a small wooden cabin perched on the edge of the forest on Mount Fløyen, above the rooftops of Bergen, Norway, and it will cost you absolutely nothing to spend the night in it. The catch? You have to have a child under 12, you can only stay once …

There's a sandstone spiral staircase inside Schloss Schadau that is considered one of the finest in Europe. The walls are dressed in 170-year-old Parisian leather. The ceiling in the Bubenberg Salon is not actually wood - it just looks that way, painted with such virtuosity that the illusion holds even …

There are places that photographs simply cannot do justice to, and Emerald Lake in British Columbia’s Yoho National Park is one of them. The water shifts between seafoam green, bright teal, and a blue so vivid it looks edited – and then the light changes, and it starts all over …

High in Portugal's Serra da Estrela, an orange-hued fortress sprawls across the mountainside like something out of a Wes Anderson film. This is no ordinary hotel. For decades, tuberculosis patients took the air on its curative balconies. Then it sat abandoned for 40 years, briefly housing refugees from Portugal's colonial …

Libušín sits on a mountain pass in the Czech Republic's Moravian-Silesian Beskids, looking like something out of a Brothers Grimm tale. This isn't some modern Alpine resort masquerading as traditional – it's the real deal, a wooden lodge dripping with hand-carved details and Art Nouveau flourishes that somehow manages to …

Sleeping 250 meters above street level in a building shaped like a sailing ship requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Ascott Raffles City Chongqing sits within one of China's most ambitious architectural projects – a complex of eight towers connected by a 300-meter horizontal skybridge that locals call The Crystal. …

Sitting on the edge of the Indian Ocean in Umhlanga, The Oyster Box is the kind of place where you can start your morning with unlimited oysters and sparkling wine at breakfast, spend your afternoon learning to make proper Durban curry, and end your evening with a cigar in a …

Somewhere in western Belize, a waterfall is tumbling into a turquoise pool that almost nobody sees. It isn't on a popular trail or a backpacker's bucket list. It's just sitting there, doing its thing, above the jungle canopy of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, which stretches across 107,000 acres …