28 remarkable hotels.A past worth carrying forward.

The most revealing addition to Badrutt’s Palace may be the passage beneath the street. The Serlas Wing stands opposite the original hotel, with contemporary rooms by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel. An underground connection brings its guests back to the Palace and to Chesa Veglia, the historic farmhouse that houses several of its restaurants. New accommodation, familiar company.

Caspar Badrutt opened the Palace in 1896. Its grand hall has since become part of the social geography of St. Moritz: a place to linger, observe, meet someone and be met. A hotel with that kind of attachment has a delicate renovation problem. People may want a different bathroom while wanting exactly the same feeling of arrival. The Serlas project gives those wishes room to coexist.

The new wing draws on Engadine building traditions through stone, framed windows and a quieter architectural presence. Inside, oak and richly textured fabrics establish warmth without asking every surface to impersonate the nineteenth century. The reporting on its opening also describes regional sgraffito along the underground route. Even the journey between buildings becomes an occasion for local craft.

There is an understanding of loyalty in this arrangement. A returning guest’s affection belongs to a sequence of experiences, some grand and some wonderfully ordinary. The chair where a conversation ran late can matter as much as the room upstairs. Badrutt’s has allowed the sleeping arrangements to evolve while keeping the social life of the house within reach. That is a generous way for a landmark to grow older.

Sources: The Palace’s history and recent additions.

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Outside The Connaught, Tadao Ando’s fountain Silence belongs to the experience of walking through Mayfair. You can encounter it without a room key. The hotel’s own guide to the neighborhood points visitors toward it, placing the commission within the life of the surrounding streets.

That is a thoughtful relationship for a luxury hotel to have with its address. An entrance can announce status. It can also contribute something worth stopping for. Here, art extends the hotel’s care beyond the people staying inside.

The Connaught Bar offers a different form of welcome. Agostino Perrone and Giorgio Bargiani lead a team working in David Collins Studio’s richly detailed room. Its fame could easily overwhelm the encounter, yet the craft remains something one person makes for another. A drink has to survive the distance between reputation and the guest holding the glass.

The team’s 2024 cocktail book opened that craft to people at home. Alongside signature drinks were the stories, preparations and techniques behind them, including nonalcoholic recipes. There is generosity in that decision. Sharing the method gives interested people a way to participate in the work. It also expresses confidence in all the things a recipe cannot bottle: attention, timing, conversation and the pleasure of being looked after.

The fountain and the book make an interesting pair. Both let a little of The Connaught travel beyond its walls. A hotel known for discretion can still be culturally generous. Privacy for its guests and openness toward the city can be held with equal care.

Sources: The Connaught Bar and its team.

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Castelfalfi’s history includes a wonderfully practical document. Its sixteenth-century statutes set rules for the communal olive mill and the grape harvest. Centuries before anyone arrived for a Tuscan holiday, people here had to work out how to share equipment and bring in a crop.

Those details make the village easier to understand. The stone buildings were part of a working arrangement with the surrounding land. Their beauty grew out of cultivation, labor and the ordinary need to get things done together.

The estate’s historical account reaches much further back, but the agricultural thread is the one I find most useful when considering its present life as a resort. The Lohia family acquired Castelfalfi in 2021, a change documented by the seller, TUI. The current estate gives guests ways to encounter its olive harvest, wine growing and beekeeping, alongside the restored village and hotel.

An encounter with a beekeeper has a different value from another attractive view. Someone who knows the work can explain what the visitor would otherwise miss. Harvest experiences also acknowledge that Tuscany has a calendar of its own. The land is doing something whether or not a guest has arrived to admire it.

There is enormous appeal in a beautifully restored borgo. Castelfalfi becomes more interesting when its architecture leads the visitor outward, toward the fields and people that give the village meaning. The old mill rules are a reminder that this place was always about relationships. A thoughtful stay can make some of those relationships visible again.

Sources: Current estate experiences.

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The approach to Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria changes the pace of Sorrento. Piazza Tasso is close at hand, but orange groves and garden separate the hotel from the activity outside. Beyond the buildings, the ground drops toward the harbor and the Gulf of Naples. The property gives guests both the town and a place to withdraw from it.

The Fiorentino family’s hotel dates to 1834. In a 2024 interview marking its 190th anniversary, Guido Fiorentino described long-serving staff, the care of the gardens and the continuity of aperitivo on the terrace and musical evenings. He also noted that the sixth generation was already working in the business. The revealing part is how readily his account moves between family history and everyday work.

Gardens require that kind of continuity. Their atmosphere depends on attention that must be renewed well after an anniversary party ends. So does the feeling of being recognized by a team. The hotel’s inheritance is partly architectural, but it also lives in people who know how the place behaves across a day and a season.

The three villas, built over the nineteenth century, give this cliffside property the character of something accumulated. Its celebrity history is substantial, yet the ongoing traditions make a stronger case for its future. A terrace matters because people still gather there. A garden matters because someone keeps it welcoming.

That long view carries a considerable responsibility. One generation receives a place already loved by strangers and works to make it worthy of the next generation’s affection. At Excelsior Vittoria, the route from the busy piazza through the garden gives that responsibility a physical form.

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Venice Venice occupies Ca’ da Mosto, an ancient palazzo on the Grand Canal that once housed the Leon Bianco hotel. Its recent history included a long period without that public life. The contemporary hotel returns the building to use while making a spirited claim about the kind of cultural life Venice can still support.

The hotel’s account of its art and architecture places works associated with Arte Povera, Fluxus and other modern movements inside the historic structure. That meeting produces a useful sense of friction. The old walls are substantial enough to hold ideas that arrived many centuries after they were built.

Francesco Simeti’s installation Bocoli, Leoni e Drappeggi reassembles Venetian visual references for the Bitter Club. Near the water entrance, Fabio Viale’s Souvenir di Pietà brings another contemporary interpretation into the guest’s path. The art asks for attention beyond the reassurance of a perfectly period room.

At ground level, Venice M’art connects design, food and a historic passage between Campo Santi Apostoli and the canal. I like the idea of that passage as part of the hotel’s identity. A building in Venice has a relationship with movement on land and water, with people arriving for different reasons, with the city’s long habit of encounter.

The project makes an encouraging contribution to the city. Venice deserves new cultural work as well as careful conservation. A restored palazzo can contribute to both. Venice Venice treats the building as a place capable of receiving another chapter, and gives artists a role in writing it. The result invites visitors to be curious about the present city as well as devoted to its past.

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Borgo Santandrea is a vertical experience. Terraces and paths lead down the cliff toward the sea, so the hotel is encountered through movement as much as through a single view. That makes its railings, floors and small transitions unusually important. They are the things a person meets along the way.

The project’s account from furniture maker Molteni names several of the people behind those details. Local blacksmith Piero Esposito made railings. Paolo Erba worked on walnut bookshelves. Cotto Vietri developed handmade floor tiles. The restoration of a 1960s property became an opportunity to bring multiple forms of craft into daily use.

The hotel documents 31 tile patterns, with references reaching from archaeological sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum to Gio Ponti. That span of influence gives the blue-and-white interiors more depth than a coastal color scheme alone could provide. The patterns belong to a region with a long material history and a lively modern design tradition.

There is considerable ambition in the scale of the redevelopment. The named makers deserve to remain visible within the story. A railing can be beautiful because of its line, but knowing that a local blacksmith made it adds another kind of attention. Someone had to resolve how it would feel, join and turn.

Borgo Santandrea’s views do not need much explanation. Its craft rewards explanation very well. On a coastline that can overwhelm the eye, the hotel gives the hand and the curious mind something to enjoy too. The grand setting is made more intimate by the care invested in the route through it.

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Lucie Weill describes joining her daughters for lunch at Pépé, the beach restaurant at Lily of the Valley. They share small dishes, and she encourages them to try everything, including vegetables from the garden. In a 2026 conversation about her day, the moment sits comfortably beside work, exercise and a favorite breakfast terrace.

That ordinary family scene says a great deal about the hotel’s character. Weill spent childhood summers here, above Gigaro on the Saint-Tropez peninsula. The place now holds another generation’s memories. Her account gives its emphasis on wellbeing a recognizably human scale: there is work to do, a body to look after, and lunch with children who are learning what they like.

The hotel opened in 2019, with Philippe Starck’s architecture and interiors. The Leading Hotels account describes low buildings, foliage, comfortable furnishings and an open connection between lounge, dining and view. The design supports an unforced movement between activity and ease.

Pleasure has room to breathe within a hotel that takes movement and personal care seriously. A beautiful setting should not become another place where a guest feels evaluated. The family lunch offers a warmer image: curiosity at the table, time together, something good growing nearby.

Lily of the Valley’s strongest invitation is to imagine a day arranged with more care. Its hillside, its beach and its dining rooms give that day different textures. The appeal becomes especially convincing when the person shaping the hotel can describe a life being lived within it, with children at the table and the afternoon still ahead.

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The Douro Valley is often understood from a distance: terraces, river, hills. At Six Senses, one of the more interesting stories takes place under the trees. The hotel’s account of its historic garden restoration describes work led by landscape architect Joana Neto to recover routes through a nineteenth-century woodland garden, including follies, water features and places to pause.

A garden of that kind is designed through movement. A path turns, a structure appears, water changes what you hear, and a seat gives you a reason to stop. Restoring it requires more than keeping the vegetation attractive. Someone has to understand the sequence of experiences the original landscape was meant to offer.

That is a thoughtful complement to a hotel set in a former manor house among vineyards. Architecture provides rooms for hospitality; the garden provides another set of spaces, open to weather and seasonal change. A visitor can become familiar with them by returning along the same path on a different morning.

The hotel’s food and wine experiences keep the agricultural setting within reach as well. In this valley, cultivation is part of what the guest has come to see. The landscape’s beauty carries the work of generations, and learning a little about its products makes that beauty more legible.

The recovered garden’s value unfolds slowly. A restored path does not require a ceremony every time someone uses it. It simply offers a better walk. The person may never know how much research or labor went into making the route feel natural. They leave having paid closer attention to a place, which is a lovely outcome for a hotel to make possible.

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For Coworth Park’s new stable suites and cottages, Martin Hulbert Design brought dried meadow flowers into resin tabletops. The detail appears in the June 2026 announcement alongside hand-drawn, block-printed Irish linen and equestrian references in leather. The landscape and the estate’s working associations became material for the rooms.

Hulbert had helped shape the hotel at its 2010 opening. Returning to the project allowed the newer work to grow from a long familiarity with the place. The cottages also gained planting intended to bring seasonal interest close to their terraces, extending the design beyond the interior boundary.

Coworth’s grounds include a substantial wildflower meadow. A guest may encounter it first at full scale, through a walk or a view, then notice its flowers preserved in a table. That small change of scale is an intelligent piece of design. It gives the room a memory of the landscape without filling it with explanatory text.

The estate’s equestrian life works similarly. Stable buildings and references to saddlery have a relationship with the place’s actual uses. The materials do more than signal a general idea of country living; they draw from what is here.

The connections are available to any curious guest. People rarely arrive with an architect’s dossier in their luggage. They understand a hotel through what they touch, where they walk and the things that catch their attention. Coworth’s newer rooms give those experiences continuity. The outdoor world remains present after the walk is over, at the scale of a flower held inside a tabletop.

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For The Alpina Gstaad, artist Ann Carrington made sculptural animal horns from antique bone and horn cutlery. The hotel’s 2015 account of its art collection describes the commissions alongside contemporary works in its public spaces. It is a pleasingly inventive response to an Alpine setting: an emblem people recognize, made through a process that gives them something new to discover.

The same account explains how HBA’s interiors drew on regional crafts. Scissor-cut patterns informed decorative elements. Glass pendants recalled cowbells. Quartz became part of lamps and other objects, while weathered timber brought the material life of older farmhouses into the building. The project began with close attention to a place and allowed its designers to make fresh things from what they found.

The hotel opened in 2012, so its connection with tradition was a deliberate creative choice rather than an inheritance of centuries-old hotel rooms. That makes the choices especially worth examining. A newer building can contribute to a regional visual language when its makers understand more than the most recognizable silhouette.

Carrington’s contribution also has a welcome sense of humor. It rewards the person who looks a little longer. The object first reads as one thing, then reveals the knives and forks that made it possible. A dining room gains a small occasion for conversation, and a familiar mountain symbol acquires an unexpected human history of use.

The Alpina’s current hotel information places it in Gstaad’s seasonal rhythm. Its enduring design interest lies in this combination of familiarity and discovery. Local references make the setting understandable; the artists and craftspeople keep it curious.

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