Encourage Your Id

If you’re like us, you may get Freudian about hotels, and start sorting them into two categories. Ego hotels would be rational, orderly, controlled — a business hotel, perhaps. The hotels below, however, walk on the wilder side. They can best be described as the Id hotels, where any sense of self-restraint should be left at home.

Reina Roja
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
From the lush green of the living roof to the infernal red of the nightclub, the Reina Roja has more in common with the Garden of Earthly Delights than it does with the typical hotel.

The Sanderson
London, England
Anyone who thought London stopped swinging after the Sixties hasn’t been to the Sanderson lately — now in its second decade this boutique-hotel trailblazer is still going strong.

COMO Shambhala Estate
Ubud, Bali
This is the last word in mountaintop Balinese luxury, and the standard by which Ubud’s luxury hotels are measured. It’s no accident that they maintain a perfect 20 on the Tablet Meter.

The Upper House
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
It’s not just that it’s a skyscraper-topping luxury hotel with boutique-chic interiors by Andre Fu — it’s that everything in the room is controllable from a hotel-issued iPod Touch.

Thompson LES
New York, New York
Manhattan’s hardly the concrete jungle it used to be, but visitors in search of a bit of that famously wild nightlife inevitably make their way to the Thompson Lower East Side.

Hayman Island Resort
Queensland, Australia
Getting yourself to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the hard part; once you’re there it’s paradise on earth, where all-out modern luxury meets unparalleled natural beauty.

Fasano
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ipanema has long been known as the beautiful people’s playground, but leave it to the Fasano family to improve the unimprovable, updating the always-glamorous Rio for a new century.