Hotel art is so often synonymous with mass-produced prints, thoughtlessly arranged in carbon-copied rooms. But there a few emerging boutique properties who are celebrating artistic expression and embracing artists, both locally and on a global scale.
Usually, between the two of us, either my friend or I have pretty well sussed where we’re headed, and what we might do there. Not this time. We’ve booked a night at Hipping Hall for its location. It’s a good mid-way point from Scotland back to London to break up the seven-hour drive. Except neither of us quite know where it is, exactly.
Imagine a luxury hotel in the heart of one of the most densely populated conurbations on the planet. Now fill it with attentive but unobtrusive staff, award winning chefs, and scatter it with private secluded rooms in extensive tropical gardens and run scores of bubbling brooks, rivulets and cascading waterfalls through its open areas and atria. And give it plenty of room; yes. Set its rooms on 10, nay 15, rolling acres of grounds purchased by its farsighted owners 40 years earlier.
In the films Mon Oncle and Playtime by the late great French film director and comic Jacques Tati, the character Monsieur Hulot is a helpless innocent in a remarkably cold and impersonal modern world. Both films were shot over 40 years ago and they beautifully capture a time that’s rather like now. We’re all rather caught up in our virtual world of email, texting, tweeting and more, but we seem to have forgotten that something a little more real exists.
The glowing sun sets over the Indian Ocean as the waves lap effortlessly onto the beach at Jimbaran Bay – the perfect backdrop to Bali’s newest restaurant, Sundara.
Like so many of the Arab nations, Egypt’s tourism sector has been hit hard. Gone are many of the tourists who swoop to Cairo to take in the pyramids. And, even Sharm el Sheikh, the popular dive and snorkel resort on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, known for being a safe haven, is now suffering. With weekly protests over President Mohammed Morsi’s sweeping legislative changes removing a check and balance system, Britain’s foreign office has issued warnings to tourists.
In paradise there would be no data roaming charges. Here on earth, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts offers travellers the next best thing: free Wi-Fi access in the group’s 78 hotels. In addition, nearly all hotels, including the Kerry Hotels and Traders Hotels, now offer complimentary Wi-Fi service in limousines so that guests can access [...]
The guests dining at the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St Moritz, Switzerland aren’t the only noteworthy subjects in the room. The walls of Le Restaurant, with its 100-year old dining room, are adorned with an historic and valuable wallpaper known as ‘Eldorado’.
Berlin is in the midst of a shift. The city is stepping away from the ultra-cool post-East hipness it has become so famous for and toward an effortless modern grandeur in the new, old West. Reflecting this shift is recently opened boutique hotel Das Stue. The hotel’s name is Danish for ‘living room’ – [...]
As culture, business and leisure intersect in destinations as diverse as Berlin, Abu Dhabi and Bangkok, a new global traveller has emerged – multi-national and cross-generational, mobile and jet-setting.
A report to be released later this month will uncover the most visible boutique…
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Perched atop the Metropolitan Tower, overlooking Suzhou's heritage-listed gardens, famed Grand Canal and the majestic Taihu Lake is the Shangri-La…
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