Hotels

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 …

There's a moment, somewhere between spotting a golden eagle banking over the Atlantic and realizing the painting next to your breakfast table is a genuine Tracey Emin, when Another Place, The Machrie 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 …

Sea Containers London isn't trying to be your typical boutique hotel. Housed in what looks like an unremarkable 1970s office block on the South Bank, this 359-room property goes all-in on its transatlantic cruise liner theme, complete with copper-plated walls that curve like a vintage ship's hull and four new …

There are places that make you question why you ever settled for ordinary vacations, and Capella Lodge on Lord Howe Island is one of them. This nine-suite retreat sits at the foot of two volcanic peaks that tower over the world's southernmost coral reef, on an island so pristine that …

Wake to manta rays gliding through turquoise water 150 meters below your bamboo bed. This is glamping at its most audacious – a sustainable bungalow perched on Nusa Penida's dramatic eastern cliffs, where you can shower with ocean views, lounge in a net suspended over the void, and watch nature's …

In the 1890s, this building on Robertson Quay was ground zero for Singapore's red-light district, a hub for opium dens, gambling houses, and Chinese secret societies who demanded 36 sacred oaths from new recruits. The street was known in Hokkien as "Chiu Long Lo" – Spirits Shed Street – after …

Spain's 98th parador took nearly two decades to build, rising from the ruins of an environmental catastrophe to become something genuinely special. Perched above a white sand beach on the Costa da Morte – the "Coast of Death," named for its countless shipwrecks – this glass and zinc structure disappears …

Sitting on a hillside above one of the world's smallest capitals, Hotel Føroyar doesn't just offer views of Tórshavn – it practically is the view. This is where international football teams crash after matches, where visiting musicians decompress, and where you can walk barefoot through rain and drizzle to reach …