The Connaught
London, United Kingdom
The Connaught occupies a red-brick corner of Mayfair that has changed hands, names and interiors more than once since the nineteenth century, and the hotel has never quite pretended otherwise. What gives the building its character is the layering: the staircase and the panelling belong to one era, the bar and the dining rooms to several later ones, and the commissioned art placed through the public spaces reads as another layer again rather than a veneer applied over the top. Guests who spend an afternoon simply moving between the ground-floor rooms usually notice this before they notice any single object.
The bedrooms are conventional in the best sense — generous, quiet, upholstered, laid out to be lived in for more than one night — which leaves the design energy concentrated where the hotel is public. That balance is deliberate. It means the property can hold contemporary work, including pieces made specifically for its rooms and courtyard, without the guest ever feeling housed inside an exhibition.
Mayfair, central London · public rooms and bars are the design focus · commissioned contemporary work placed throughout · restaurants, bar and spa on site
Hotel Eden
Rome, Italy
Hotel Eden sits on the slope between the Spanish Steps and the Villa Borghese, and the whole building is organised around the fact that its upper floors can see most of Rome at once. The rooftop terrace is the obvious expression of this, but the logic runs further down: circulation, lounges and the better bedrooms are arranged so that the view arrives as a series of framed moments rather than one payoff at the top.
Inside, the register is restrained Roman — marble used sparingly, warm woods, plenty of natural light, and art and antiques chosen to sit with the architecture instead of competing with it. The result is a hotel that feels considerably calmer than its central address suggests. A short walk returns you to some of the busiest streets in the city; the hotel's own rooms do not carry any of that noise.
Between the Spanish Steps and the Villa Borghese · rooftop terrace with city-wide views · restrained interiors in marble and wood · dining, bar and spa on site
Villa d'Este
Lake Como, Italy
Villa d'Este was built as a cardinal's villa in the sixteenth century and became a hotel in the nineteenth, which means the grounds are older than the hospitality and still largely dictate it. The mosaic nymphaeum, the avenue of plane trees and the terraced gardens were laid out for a private household, and the hotel has been fitted into that plan rather than the other way around — a constraint that has kept it from being modernised into anonymity.
The main building's public rooms are frescoed, chandeliered and unapologetically formal; a second building on the grounds is lighter and later in date. Between them the property offers two quite different experiences of the same lake frontage. Guests tend to describe the place less as a hotel with a garden than as a garden that has learned to accommodate guests.
Cernobbio, on the western shore of Lake Como · sixteenth-century villa, hotel since the nineteenth century · terraced historic gardens and lakefront · two guest buildings, formal and lighter in character