Find yourself in one of the city’s most auspicious locations, just off the Pest side of the Chain Bridge, and the square provides a perfect vantage point for taking in the whole building at once. Of course it’s not just an architectural monument, but a luxury hotel as well. The hotel is nothing less than classic, from the bar and café, serving local pastry, to the Italian-inflected fine dining restaurant. And no Budapest trip would be complete without a spa visit: this one, on the top floor rather than in the cellar, includes a cozy little infinity pool.
The sophisticated Shinta Mani Club boutique hotel in Siem Reap invites you with its soft lighting, fragrant scents and made-you-look, mod-Cambodian design, care of US interiors whizz Bill Bensley. Mission out on tailored tours to Ankgor’s dazzling temples, then retreat to your spacious suite or savour the cool pool, soothing spa and dreamy swing-seat dining. For views over the courtyard pool from your balcony, opt for a spacious upper-floor Deluxe Room, or for privacy and a small garden, make it a ground-floor Deluxe pad. Our personal faves are the Superior Poolside boudoirs with chill-out porches just steps from the refreshing lap pool. Showers get more sumptuous as you upgrade.
There is nothing more exhilarating than waking each morning to the incredible view of the Arenal Volcano. Nayara Hotel is a genuine sanctuary where nothing is too much. Your first stop should be the spa which sits high above the rainforest. Indulgent treatments are accompanied by the sounds of tropical bird song and calming trickling water. All around the Nayara Hotel gardens, capuchin and howler monkeys frolic through the trees while toucans and humming birds are common sights. Catch a glimpse of a three-toed sloth and the brightly coloured butterflies that flutter among the tropical flowers.
Baby-powder white-sand beaches, the gently lapping turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, and thatched-roof bungalows stuffed to the rafters with sleek high-end furnishings and discreet high-tech pampering. Every single one of its 45 suites stands over the water, from the Villa Suites, clustered along jetties that fan out from the island, to the Residences, each at the end of its own walkway, to the ultra-private Crusoe Residences, marooned farther out in the sea, reachable only by pontoon boat.
