Three hotels where a collection, a setting or a long creative history shapes the stay.
Porto Ercole, Italy
Hotel Il Pellicano
Porto Ercole sits on the Monte Argentario promontory in southern Tuscany. Il Pellicano looks down from the rocks above the Tyrrhenian Sea, a cluster of terracotta-toned buildings and terraces stepping toward the water.
It opened in the 1960s and quickly drew a crowd of writers, actors and photographers. That era still sets the tone. The hotel treats its photographic past as a living archive, and it continues to work with artists and photographers today.
Rooms are spread across the main villa and garden cottages. Days tend to revolve around the sea-level pool and bathing platforms cut into the rock.
Clifftop setting
Mid-century history
Photography
Sea bathing
Cornwall, England
Wilderness
Cornwall has drawn painters for well over a century. The light in the far west, and the art colonies that grew up around St Ives and Newlyn, gave the county a reputation that still shapes its small hotels.
Wilderness belongs to that tradition. It is a small hotel, and it is included here for the way art and landscape sit together in the stay rather than for any single showpiece.
Expect a quiet base more than a resort. Coastal paths, galleries and working harbours are the natural day plan.
Small hotel
Cornish landscape
Coast paths
Art-colony country
Pomerol, France
Le Pigeonnier de Pomerol
Pomerol is a small wine appellation on the right bank of the Dordogne, just outside Libourne. Vineyards run almost to every doorstep. Many châteaux here are working farms rather than grand estates.
A pigeonnier is a dovecote, one of the tower-like farm buildings found all over south-west France. The hotel takes its name from that rural architecture and keeps the scale small.
It earns a place in this section for its sense of place. The building, the vines outside and the surrounding villages do the work a gallery would do elsewhere.