Luxury Lodge in Chilean Patagonia
The drive from Punta Arenas takes five hours. Five hours north through Southern Patagonia, past estancias where guanacos outnumber people by several orders of magnitude, along roads that sometimes feel more like suggestions than infrastructure, until you finally reach the edge of Torres del Paine National Park. Then you see it: a low, curving structure […]
Clay Castle in the Transylvanian Countryside
Castelul de Lut Valea Zânelor: A fairytale castle sculpted entirely from clay in Romania’s Făgăraș Mountains where hobbit holes meet Gaudí’s fever dreams.
Wilderness Homestead at the Edge of Western Australia
El Questro Homestead: Nine suites perched above the Chamberlain Gorge where the Kimberley reveals itself in rust-red cliffs and the luxury is earned.
Private Island Hotel in Norway
Getting to Lilløy requires a boat. This is worth noting upfront, because it changes everything about arrival. You drive forty minutes north from Bergen along Norway’s west coast, past fishing villages and rocky outcrops, until you reach Herdla, a small settlement that looks exactly like what happens when Vikings settle somewhere beautiful and then mostly […]
Former Monastery in the Netherlands
You arrive at what appears to be a 15th-century Gothic church on a quiet square in Maastricht’s old town. Stone walls. Lancet windows. The kind of medieval architecture that tends to house museums or the occasional concert. Then you walk through the entrance, an illuminated orange copper tunnel designed by Ingo Maurer, and realize this […]
Mountain Resort in the Swiss Alps
There are hotels with spas. And then there’s the Tschuggen Grand Hotel, where Mario Botta, the Swiss architect responsible for some of the most thoughtful modernist buildings of the last half-century, designed a 5,000-square-metre wellness sanctuary and then buried most of it inside a mountain. Only nine triangular glass “sails” emerge from the hillside, glowing […]
Floating Hotel in Swedish Lapland
There’s a particular kind of quiet that only exists this far north. It arrives with the snow, settles deep into the birch forest, and doesn’t ask permission. Arctic Bath has been built entirely around that quiet. Fifty kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, in the unremarkable-sounding village of Harads (population: approximately 500, ambience: priceless) sits […]
Mountain Sanctuary in the Italian Dolomites
There are wellness retreats, and then there’s Forestis: a place where architecture dissolves into landscape, and silence becomes the most coveted luxury on offer. Perched at 1,800 meters on a forested slope above Brixen, this South Tyrolean masterpiece reimagines what it means to retreat. The design philosophy is deceptively simple: three slender towers rising like […]
Lodge on the Nile Rapids in Uganda
There are remote getaways, and then there’s sleeping on a private island in the middle of the Nile River, accessible only by boat, surrounded by Class V rapids that create a constant roar of white water while rainforest covers every surface not claimed by granite. Wildwaters Lodge exists in this category of genuinely extraordinary: a […]
Open Air Suite in South Africa
There are landscapes that humble you, and then there’s the Cederberg wilderness where Kagga Kamma exists: a 15,000-hectare private nature reserve where red Karoo sandstone has been sculpted by millennia into otherworldly formations, where San rock art tells stories thousands of years old, and where the night sky reveals the cosmos with a clarity that […]