The Pierre, A Taj Hotel, New York - Opulence In The Central Park

There is a photograph taken of you on arrival and placed on your nightstand by the time you reach your suite. The card alongside it reads: "We are celebrating you." This tells you almost everything you need to know about La Residence. The hotel - part of the family-owned Royal …

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 …

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 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'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 …

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 …