The rooms and bungalows at Strawberry Hill are built to meticulous nineteenth-century specifications. You sleep in mahogany four-poster beds shrouded in muslin, and gaze out at the stunning mountain landscape while swinging in your hammock. It was created by Chris Blackwell as a salon for friends like Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, so, continuing in the tradition, guests are encouraged to mingle, debate, and jam.

The Belmond Copacabana Palace is still the place to live the fantasy of the Rio of decades gone by. Built in 1923, at the birth of the Jazz Age, this gleaming white edifice towers over Copacabana Beach, patterned after a couple of other classic seaside hotels, the Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes. Copacabana Beach is the kind of place you have to see before you die — why not do it in high style?

The first SoHo loft hotel is still the definitive entry in the genre. This 19th-century Romanesque Revival building was filled with artists’ lofts during the neighborhood’s postwar heyday, and its late-’90s renovation at the hands of superstar interior designer Christian Liaigre transformed it into one of the best of the first generation of boutique hotels.

Safe to say this one lives up to its name. Splendido, a Belmond Hotel, is a Ligurian classic, and a longtime favorite among Italian grand hotels — Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor was the first person to sign the guest book in 1901. Today it’s as fine as it ever was, subtly modernized and continually updated, but always true to the historical spirit of the original Splendido.

Even before its star turn in 2003’s Lost in Translation, Park Hyatt Tokyo was well known as one of the first proper luxury hotels to truly embrace contemporary design. A 2025 renovation by Paris-based Studio Jouin Manku’s has it back at the top of the modern luxury-hotel game. It’s also literally at the top of the 52-story Shinjuku Park Tower, a position that lends it extraordinary views of Tokyo.

The grand dame of the Canadian railway hotels, Château Frontenac is Québec City’s most famous landmark, a century-old castle high on a bluff over the St. Lawrence river; towering above the city’s Vieux Québec historic district. It’s a tourist attraction in its own right, and there’s nothing subtle about it — past the sightseers in the lobby is a vast and labyrinthine hotel of some six hundred rooms across six wings.

What needs to be said about Chateau Marmont at this point, a hotel that’s cooler than all of us put together? Built in 1929 to mimic the Chateau D’Amboise, a castle in France’s Loire Valley, its French late Gothic Flamboyant style includes fluted pillars, vaulted ceilings, and the perfect amount of heavy, dark wood. The drama of the building more than matches the drama that has taken place within its walls.

La Mamounia is pure fantasy: huge, bright, and excessive, a glittering combination of the Art Deco and Moroccan traditions with mosaics, painted columns, and gleaming marble floors. Turbaned waiters, belly dancers, and doormen wearing fezes greet a new celebrity set that includes the Clintons, Naomi Campbell and Tom Cruise. There are five restaurants, a spa, and a casino, and rooms modeled after railway carriages and ocean liners.

Claridge’s is by any lights one of the best hotels in London, and it’s almost certainly the poshest. Even today, this Mayfair landmark — where the crowned heads of Europe came to wait out the Second World War — remains splendidly and timelessly Art Deco. Stroll past the black awning into an entry foyer with Lalique vases, gilded columns, a sweeping staircase ornamented with brass banister that is polished daily.

Inn of the Anasazi — named for the ancient civilization that built the region’s distinctive cliff dwellings — offers an unusually authentic and culturally sensitive New Mexican experience. The interiors are antique in style, and the work of New Mexican and Native American artists and craftspeople is featured prominently throughout. It’s also just about as central as a Santa Fe hotel can get, just steps from the Plaza.

The medieval village of Eze is one of the most amazing places on the Côte d’Azur, offering spectacular sweeping ocean views that simply can’t be matched from any lower elevation. Here, Château de la Chèvre d’Or began its life as a private residence, and as it’s grown, many of the surrounding houses have been absorbed into the hotel. As a result the 45 rooms and suites are scattered throughout the village.

Only in architecturally adventurous Barcelona would one find a downtown grand hotel in a style like this; Claris Hotel & Spa GL is a postmodern mélange of the modern and the classic. Obviously anything but your typical chain hotel, the Claris is owned by the art collector Jordi Clos, who has outfitted the hotel’s first floor with a collection of pre-Columbian artworks, and placed Egyptian carvings, Turkish kilims and Hindu sculptures in the guest rooms.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, the Clarence is owned by Bono and the Edge, of U2 fame. And yes, the Clarence is more or less the official stopover for actors, musicians and the like — but we’d argue that this has little to do with the owners’ marquee value, and everything to do with the fact that, at bottom, it’s simply a well-designed and thoughtfully conceived hotel.

Most of Asia’s grand hotels are ostentatious skyscrapers, but the Sukhothai breaks the mold — this low-slung and labyrinthine complex, designed by Ed Tuttle (of Aman fame) sprawls over six acres, and functions as an island of calm amidst the bustle of that other City of Angels. Gardens, courtyards and lotus pools await around every corner, and the restaurant floats on a man-made lake.

The Establishment Hotel is near-perfect, a thirty-one-room boutique that, as they say, does exactly what it says on the tin; offers chic and comfortable lodging in a convenient city location, and attracts the town’s best and brightest young things to its bars and restaurants. Rooms are either strikingly Japanese, with black floorboards and loft-style timbered ceilings, with dashes of vivid color, or soothingly international.

Hotel Goldener Hirsch has existed in one form or another since 1407, the year of the first mention in the city’s archives of an inn on this spot in Salzburg’s Old Town, just down the road from the birthplace of Mozart. Its present incarnation dates back to 1948, and is today a delightful trip backwards through time, decorated in decades-old antiques, designed more in the style of a rustic lodge than a baroque palace.