10 Hotels For Homebodies

In another era, we might have called these B&Bs — small-scale hotels where the emphasis is on personalized service, delivered with a bit of local charm. But this is a different breed, and a decidedly more modern one. They’re evidence that you can have coziness and style in the same small package. So here’s to enjoying a bit of domestic bliss, even if it’s only temporarily your own.

Medusa Hotel
Sydney, Australia
Quirky, stylish Medusa is a converted eighteenth-century Victorian townhouse in ultra-fashionable Darlinghurst, Sydney’s gallery and boutique district. The award-winning design, by prominent Australian interior architect Scott Werner, is anything but Victorian; in fact these daring, modern interiors are a large factor in Medusa’s draw, especially among the young, creative types the hotel (and the neighborhood) caters to.

Odette en Ville
Brussels, Belgium
Odette en ville: Odette’s place in the city. A pocket-sized boutique in Brussels, named for (as best we can tell) a fictional character. While a lot of Brussels hotels, were they personified, might be a bit dowdy, a bit old-fashioned, this one is chic in an understated way, dressed in a manner that’s versatile enough to suit any occasion, from the boardroom, as they say, to the bedroom.

Villa Spalletti Trivelli
Rome, Italy
You wouldn’t believe how hard it is not to resort to clichéd phrases like “La Dolce Vita.” See, there, we’ve gone and said it again. But it’s hard to see what the alternative is — life in a posh Roman villa is indeed sweet, and if ever there were a hotel that perfectly exemplifies the genre, it’s the Villa Spalletti Trivelli, on Quirinal Hill around the south side of the Palace. All of the twelve rooms and suites are capacious and elegant, with antique furniture and up-to-date amenities.

Healdsburg Modern Cottages
Healdsburg, California
The Healdsburg Modern Cottages live up to their name, all four of them, on this tiny, immaculate property tucked right behind Healdsburg’s charming downtown main street. After check-in (which actually occurs off-site at the Barndiva gallery) you’ll walk past the bakery and behind a white fence you’ll find “Eileen,” “George,” “Charles” and “Ray,” each cottage named for a master of modernism.

Inn at Irving Place
New York, New York
Quite the opposite of what the New York hotel world has lately become, the Inn at Irving Place is like a snapshot of an entirely different era — a pair of 1834 townhouses without so much as a sign to mark its presence. Rooms are luxurious in a simple and old-fashioned manner, with 21st-century necessities like wireless internet and loaner laptops alongside four-poster beds and cherrywood floors, with wooden shutters on the windows to insulate you from the city outside. Afternoon tea service is the kind of throwback that we could get used to.

Casa De Madrid
Madrid, Spain
Like the Inn at Irving place, the entrance to Casa de Madrid is equally subtle — a small plaque simply says CdM. It feels less like a VIP arrival than an initiation into a secret society, an impression that’s only reinforced by the extensive collection of artworks and antiquities, collected over the years by the Casa’s owner, a professional art historian. If the beauty of the interiors ever starts to fade, the hotel’s seven individually-themed rooms look out Plaza Oriente and the Royal Palace.

Riyad Al Moussika
Marrakech, Morocco
If serene opulence is your thing, you’ll be delighted to find that you can’t possibly do much better than the Riyad al Moussika. This entire palace is divided into just six lodgings: three suites, two double rooms, and, charmingly, a single. The idea is that you’ll feel like a royal guest, and the experience is designed around this effect, from the incredible detail of the architecture and décor to the friendly and solicitous service to the remarkable feeling of privacy — you might pass an entire stay at the Riyad without noticing that there are in fact other guests.

The Hatton
Melbourne, Australia
Though set in a striking hundred-year-old Italianate mansion, the Hatton is utterly up to date. Period features such as stained glass and stone archways are accented with bold colors and sleek contemporary furniture. The building has been completely renovated, the exterior painstakingly restored, and the interior, courtesy of architect Geoffrey Borrack, has been constructed from scratch to fit the existing structure.

San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge
Alto Adige, Italy
South Tyrol is dotted with former hunting lodges, a Germanic tradition befitting a place that straddles Austrian and Italian cultures, languages, and lifestyle. More and more often they’re finding themselves converted into luxury boutique hotels, some of them quite contemporary in design. San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge, though stylishly updated, keeps a little closer to its roots. It’s only available to one party at a time, its four bedrooms housing up to ten guests — prepare to encounter no one else except the owners, and maybe a chef or two, for the duration.

Aram Yami Hotel
Bahia, Brazil
Surrounded by the vibrant colors of the historic old town, the Aram Yami Hotel is a boutique housed in a 19th-century residence, affording views of the Todos os Santos Bay that bring to mind a beachfront retreat. With only five rooms, guests can look forward to the personalized experience of an upscale bed-and-breakfast, albeit one where much of the décor is given over to Asian art objects, specifically golden Buddhist wall hangings. Somehow, the hotel still manages to feel wholly Brazilian — maybe it’s the multiple swimming pools.

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