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Our hotels are kept by accidental hoteliers: people who fell for a plot of land, a particular view or an old relic nobody else wanted, and followed it somewhere creative. A gift voucher hands someone a stay inside that story, bought from the owners themselves, who still answer their own emails. Each is valid for twelve months, and where a hotel sends its vouchers digitally, a late decision still makes it under the tree.
Robert De Niro’s TriBeCa address of Civil War timber and handmade brick, its spa a 250-year-old Japanese barn reassembled without nails. Manhattan, minus the gilt.
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Architect Carolyn Sarah Herzog built a hotel that knows when to stay quiet: structured plaster, oak, mountain grit and Japanese-taught respect for leaving things out.
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Klaus and Carmen’s mountain obsession at 1,230 metres: a salt-water infinity pool in volcanic stone, a porphyry onsen open to the sky, coffee roasted in-house.
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Four rooms on the Horn Head peninsula: breakfast through a hatch, seaweed baths, turf fires and the wild Atlantic. Cathrine and Niall’s blackened-larch eyrie, undiluted.
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Grant Maunder’s adults-only Alpine retreat with a Welsh soul: Vitra sofas, slate underfoot, Welsh blankets and a revolving door lifted from Peter Sellers. Entirely unforced.
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A two-hundred-acre working finca beneath the Tramuntana: almond, carob and fig trees, terracotta tiles, and the Mirabona kitchen plating Mallorca’s sun-warmed flavours along the veranda.
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Salzburg’s oldest inn, trading since 1350, where Mozart once drank and three hundred contemporary works now hang throughout. Andreas Gfrerer’s arthotel faces the Festival Hall.
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White villas skim sixty-six hectares of vineyard and lake. Star-gazing suites, vinotherapy treatments, and Alentejan wines serious enough to plan a winter escape around them.
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On ground the Schmuck family have worked since 1617, a forest spa runs cryotherapy at minus 110, breathwork among the pines, sushi beside the water.
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Edy and Miki Longo sank six suites into their own Arco vineyard: rusted steel, raw concrete, and a black infinity pool holding the mountains still.
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Forty-three thousand pieces of river driftwood shape a spa around a natural bathing lake: five pools, ten heat rituals, hammocks over living water, all winter.
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Max and Sebastian Witzmann run Seebichl the way they live: off-script and analogue. Schnitzel suppers, a black-clad terrace, and lake-still evenings under the Wilder Kaiser.
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Honeyed timbers and noir accents at 1,218 metres on Engelberg’s sunny slope. Two Nordics and a Canadian run a foodie basecamp with a fire pit.
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A 200-year-old inn and barn by the Liechtenstein border, joined in Swiss walnut and Scandinavian classics. Famed for its table, and a cellar worth descending.
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Reclaimed spruce, ancient oak and steel sky pools at 1,800 metres in Arosa, plus their own cookie of Schanfigg honey by star patissier Christian Humbs.
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A seventeenth-century inn on the IJmeer, twenty minutes from Amsterdam and a million from its noise. Open-flame cooking at De Mark, and a pontoon terrace.
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Named for Ullr, the Norse god of snow, and set opposite the Galzig lift. Stephanie Thatenhorst’s interiors make it St Anton’s most dandyish ski base.
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An 1848 patrician home in Giacometti’s valley, kept by the Erne family: larch boards, tiled stoves, open-fire suppers and walnut tarts, with conversation running late.
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Seven centuries as inn, manor house, farm store and even a pizzeria. Now twenty-nine rooms, with a golden tunnel down to the vaulted cellar bar.
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A 1909 Queen Anne pile above the Tay, stripped to pitch-pine bones and refitted with Urquiola sofas. Nine suites, a firepit, room for the clan.
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Twelve timber chalets near the Chiemsee, each with a private sauna, hot tub and the Kampenwand in the window. Agrad is Bavarian for just right.
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Matterhorn views, Claudia Silberschmidt’s playful Belle Époque interiors and a table at The Grill: the Beausite Zermatt gift voucher, bought directly from the owning families.
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Five generations of Saeli-Rizzutos, still farming 500 hectares in the Madonie foothills. Zero-kilometre food, rewilded land, and a masseria where baroque flourish meets candlelight.
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Seven design apartments threaded through a sixteenth-century Porto townhouse, six years into the restoration: spiral staircase, lantern skylight, stucco ceilings. A city break with history.
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A five-hundred-year-old nail smithy an hour south of Munich, refined to limewash, oak and stone. Bavarian heritage, gently filtered, in the snowy cradle of Geitau.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.