Hospitality has the air of a craft that has remembered what it is. The years of hotel groups trying to behave like wellness apps are mostly behind us; the rooms are smaller again, the staff are older, the lobbies are quieter. What we are interested in this year is the kind of property that does five things very well and refuses to do the sixth — the suite that doesn't have a soundbar in it, the restaurant that has thirty seats and a printed menu, the bar that closes at midnight because the bar staff would like to go home.
Four hotels we are planning around this summer. I have stayed at three of them; the fourth is on the list for September. In every case the case for going is older than the brochure.
Aman Venice occupies the Palazzo Papadopoli, a sixteenth-century palazzo on the Grand Canal that opened as a hotel in 2013 after a long and quietly serious restoration. The Tiepolo ceiling frescoes are real, the staircase is real, the staff are unhurried in the way only Aman staff seem to be unhurried. There are twenty-four rooms, which is roughly twenty fewer than the building's footprint would suggest, and that arithmetic is the whole pitch. Eat breakfast on the canal terrace, walk to San Marco before the day boats arrive, and try to ignore the bill until you are home.
The Verdura Resort sits on Sicily's south coast outside Sciacca — a Rocco Forte property opened in 2009, built into a long stretch of olive grove that ends at the sea. Two championship golf courses by Kyle Phillips run along the cliff line, and the food at the Italian restaurant is what you imagine it is. The argument for the Verdura is the calendar: book it in late September and you get most of what August offered, with half the bodies and a more honest light. Bring a book. The walking path from the spa to the south end of the property takes about fifteen unhurried minutes.
In the Engadin we are booked at the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in Pontresina, which opened in 1848 and has been in good hands ever since. The Neoclassical exterior is the postcard; the surprise is how warm the interiors remain, and how seriously the kitchen takes itself. Pontresina in July is one of the last truly walkable luxury landscapes in Europe — the Roseg valley walks start from the door, the air above fifteen hundred metres does its trick on your sleep, and the dining room takes its time. Three nights here is the right number; four is better.
And for Provence we are returning to La Bastide de Moustiers, the small Alain Ducasse-owned auberge in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie. Thirteen rooms, a single kitchen, a kitchen garden that supplies most of what arrives on the plate. It is not a grand hotel, and that is the point. You eat what the chef has decided to cook, you sit outside under the plane trees, and you accept that the village empties at nine in the evening and the noise of cicadas takes over. It is the sort of place that quietly reminds you what a hotel can be when nobody is trying to scale it.
What ties these together is the same thing that ties together the watches and the cars we cover in the rest of the magazine — they are run by people who plan to be doing this for a long time, by hand, and who would rather have one room of patient regulars than four floors of strangers. Plan a summer around three rooms, not nine, and the year usually turns out better.
