Where my clients and I have been lately

Spread-out studios with private patios at the north end of Napa Valley, where the traffic finally thins. The draw is Spa Solage and its geothermal mud treatments, plus a bathhouse circuit of thermal pools that runs from cold to deeply warm. Solbar holds a Michelin star, there are bicycles for everyone, and the whole place stays deliberately low-key. Calistoga itself is a two-minute ride away and still behaves like a small town.

Above Hulopoe Bay on an island with barely any paved road, which is the whole point. Rooms are large and face the water, spa treatments happen in open-air hale, and Nobu is downstairs. Humpbacks come into the bay through the winter, close enough to watch from the balcony. Hawaii at the pace it used to move, with golf on the cliffs above. Getting there means a ferry from Maui or a short hop by plane, and that alone filters the crowds.

A natural thermal river runs straight through the gardens, dropping through pools and falls beneath the canopy, and it is the entire reason to come. Busy in the middle of the day, so go early or late and ask about the adults-only springs. Arenal fills the view, the rainforest starts at the edge of the lawn, and the water is hot all year. Stay on the property and the springs are effectively yours once the day visitors leave.

An 1855 Second Empire building on the corner between the Louvre and the Palais Royal, about as central as Paris gets. Grand rather than boutique: high ceilings, tall windows, a glass-roofed lobby. Pissarro painted the avenue below from an upstairs window. Worth it on a first visit for the walking alone, with the Comédie-Française next door. Ask for a room on the Place André Malraux side for the view down the avenue.

Adult-focused, off the Silverado Trail in St. Helena and surrounded by working vineyard. Sixty-four rooms open straight onto the vines, with outdoor fireplaces and soaking tubs on the terraces. Small enough to feel private in a valley that often is not, and central enough that the wineries worth the detour are minutes in either direction. Book a vineyard-view room rather than a garden one; the difference is real.

On Wailea Beach, along Maui’s drier and sunnier south shore. A big, polished resort rather than a boutique one, and very good at being exactly that: three pools including one reserved for adults, a beach you can properly swim off, and a deep balcony on every room. Easy with children, easy with a group, and easy to do nothing at all. Ask for a room high on the ocean side; the difference in outlook is worth the jump.

Tented suites along a ridge facing Arenal, each with a private plunge pool fed by the volcanic springs. Canvas walls, a proper bed, and a deck out over the forest canopy. It is small and genuinely quiet, sloths turn up in the trees most mornings, and the volcano sits close enough to feel slightly improbable from the pillow. The food is good enough that leaving for dinner never really occurs to anyone.

A terracotta building on the edge of the centro, with gardens, a long pool and the Parroquia’s pink spires rising a few streets away. Luna, the rooftop bar, is the best sunset in town and therefore the busiest. Rooms are large and properly Mexican rather than generically colonial. Everything worth seeing is walkable, which is the whole point of San Miguel.

Forty-eight rooms around a courtyard on a quiet street off the Rue Dauphine, hidden behind a carriage gate you would walk past. The Guerlain spa occupies the thirteenth-century vaulted cellar of the abbey that stood here first. Boutique in the real sense: no lobby scene, no crowd, and the whole of Saint-Germain out the front door. Breakfast in the vaulted room downstairs is reliably the best half hour of the day.

A small inn, closer to a bed and breakfast than a hotel, a few minutes’ walk from the middle of Yountville. Simple rooms around a garden, breakfast included, nothing elaborate about it. What you are really paying for is the address: you can walk to dinner at some of the best restaurants in the country, and walk home again afterwards. There are only a handful of rooms, so book further ahead than feels necessary.

An Auberge resort on Viti Levu’s Coral Coast, where villas come with private plunge pools and a dedicated attendant, and families get a nanny who genuinely changes what a week away feels like. There is a private island offshore for lunch, horses on the sand at low tide, and reef close enough to swim out to before breakfast. It is a long drive from Nadi and worth every minute of it.

Low-rise residences above Kapalua Bay, on Maui’s quieter northwest corner. The suites are enormous, with full kitchens and laundry, which makes this the one to book for a group or anything longer than a week. Two of the island’s best swimming beaches are a short walk down, the golf is serious, and the whole place feels residential rather than resort. Molokai sits on the horizon and the sunsets from the lawn are absurd.

Architect-designed bungalows scattered through dry forest above a thermal river canyon, out in the Miravalles volcanic field rather than on the usual circuit. More design hotel than resort: you climb down into the river to soak rather than sit beside a pool, and there is a via ferrata and a zipline over the gorge if you want them. Bring shoes you do not mind soaking, and expect to see almost nobody else.

Rosewood’s 2025 opening on the Riviera Nayarit coast, 134 all-suite rooms stepped down a jungle hillside above the Pacific. Every one has its own plunge pool and a terrace facing either the ocean or the forest behind it. It shares the Mandarina estate with One&Only but reads calmer and more grown-up. New enough that the planting is still filling in; ask for a suite on the ocean side.

A small modern hotel in the centro, built around a rooftop pool that looks straight across the tiled domes to the Parroquia. Contemporary where most of San Miguel is colonial, which makes it a good contrast if you have already stayed in the old houses. Compact, central, and considerably better value than the grand options. Ask for one of the upper floors.

A vineyard estate on the Saint-Tropez peninsula, reached down an alley of century-old palms. There are treehouse rooms in the grounds, a kitchen garden that feeds the restaurant, and a private beach club at Gigaro a few minutes below. Far enough from the town to be properly quiet, close enough to go in for dinner and come straight back. Go in May or September, when the peninsula empties and the heat is manageable.

A 1926 desert hideaway of Spanish casitas and citrus groves under the Santa Rosa mountains, built when Garbo and Capra wanted somewhere to disappear to. It has grown a great deal since: forty-one pools, tennis courts, and five courses including the Stadium and Nicklaus layouts at PGA West. Sprawling rather than intimate, and full of history. Ask for one of the older casitas near the original courtyards rather than the newer wings.

The top fourteen floors of Kenzo Tange’s Shinjuku Park Tower, 177 rooms hanging above the city. They are enormous by Tokyo standards, all warm wood and deep soaking tubs, with Fuji on the horizon on a clear morning. Club on the Park has a pool under a glass roof at the very top, and the New York Bar on 52 is still the best room in the city for a drink. Shinjuku station is a ten-minute walk and the rest of the city opens up from there.

Sixteen villas on a private island in Beqa Lagoon, adults only and reached by boat. Each is stepped into the hillside with its own plunge pool and a deck angled so you never see another guest. Beqa is one of the great dive lagoons in the Pacific and the reef begins a few metres off the sand. Small, remote, and quiet in a way larger islands are not. Meals are included, which matters on an island with nowhere else to eat.

Residences with full kitchens at Hōkūala on Kauai’s east side, wrapped around an ocean course with more holes on the water than almost anywhere. It works more like a home than a hotel. There is a working farm supplying the kitchen, a lagoon for paddling, and the airport is close enough that you do not lose the first day getting there. Hanalei and the north shore are a straightforward drive when you want the scenery.

A large resort on Peninsula Papagayo, its building stepped down the hillside so nothing stands between the rooms and the water. Two beaches, one on the open Pacific and one on calm Culebra Bay, which covers both surfing and small children in the same trip. Strong for families and groups, and the peninsula itself is beautifully undeveloped. Liberia airport is about forty minutes away, so the holiday starts quickly.

Treehouse and cliff villas scattered through jungle on the Riviera Nayarit, reached by buggy along tracks cut into the hillside. The architecture is the draw: thatched roofs up in the canopy, a restaurant out on its own headland, a beach club below. Dramatic rather than restful, and one of the best-looking resorts in Mexico. Puerto Vallarta airport is about an hour south.

Belmond’s San Miguel hotel, spread across several restored eighteenth-century mansions on cobbled streets behind the Parroquia. Courtyards with fountains, thick walls, no two rooms alike, and a cooking school in one of the houses. It feels like staying in the town rather than next to it. Rooms vary a lot between the casas, so ask which one you are being put in.

An 1891 timber hotel in the village of Øye, beneath the Sunnmøre Alps at the end of a fjord arm. Properly historic rather than styled to look it: antiques, a library, a billiard room, and rooms named for the people who slept in them, Ibsen and Conan Doyle among them. A base for hiking, climbing and skiing rather than for lounging. Dinner is served at a set hour in the old dining room, and that formality is part of the appeal.

Built into the medieval village of Èze, rooms spread across several stone buildings and no two of them alike. The pool sits on the cliff edge several hundred metres above the Mediterranean and the restaurant holds Michelin stars. Cars cannot reach it, so you arrive on foot through the village, which sets the tone for everything after. Nice airport is about half an hour away, which makes even two nights worth doing.

An eighteenth-century masia in the Empordà, inland from the Costa Brava, with metre-thick stone walls and a garden of cypress and olive. Rooms in the old house have beamed ceilings and cool stone floors; the garden suites are lighter and more modern. Girona’s restaurants and the best coves on the coast are each a short drive away. Come for the cooking as much as the coast; this corner of Catalonia is why people fly in.

A restored 1929 mansion in Lastarria, the part of Santiago you actually want to be walking around. Genuinely boutique, built around a glass-roofed atrium, with a roof terrace that looks straight at the Andes on a clear day. Cerro Santa Lucía is at the end of the street, the museums a few blocks further, and the restaurants closer still. For what it is, it remains remarkable value by the standards of almost anywhere else.

On a ridge in the Santa Rosa foothills, high enough above the Coachella Valley that the view runs its entire length and the evenings cool off well before town does. A large resort with a genuinely good spa and a terrace built for sunset. Bighorn sheep live on the hillside behind and wander through often enough that nobody remarks on it. Palm Springs is twenty minutes down the hill on the evenings you want more going on.

A small lodge on the Rogue River, seven miles up from the Oregon coast, with rooms facing the water and very little else around. Dinner is communal if you want it to be. The point is the river: fishing, jet boats, and long evenings on the lawn watching it move past. Somewhere to read and go to bed early rather than to be entertained. Phone signal is patchy, which is very much the correct outcome here.

Floors 48 to 60 of the Comcast Technology Center, the tallest building in the city, so all 219 rooms are floor-to-ceiling glass and the view runs well past the skyline. There is an infinity pool on 57 and a Jean-Georges restaurant in the sky lobby above it, with Greg Vernick’s oyster bar down at street level. A proper city hotel. Rittenhouse Square, the museums and the market are all walkable from the door.