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Exqz - Curated Guides, Places & Experiences
Exqz curates the world's most exquisite places, experiences, and city guides. Discover handpicked destinations, things to do, and travel stories from around the world.
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Puglia Is Getting a Championship Golf Course: La Maviglia Opens in 2027
A 202-hectare estate near Maruggio with 70 suites, 35 villas and a 5,000-square-metre medical spa, all arranged around the one thing Puglia's masseria hotels cannot offer.
Design
A Private Golf Club With No Course: Stableford Opens in West Los Angeles This Winter
No new private golf club has opened on the Westside in more than fifty years, and there is no land left for a course. Stableford's answer is eight TrackMan lounges, one of the largest indoor putting greens in California, private cold plunges and a bar, capped at a few hundred members.
Architecture
Heatherwick Studio Rethinks the Belvedere, and Louisville Gets a Better Park for It
New renderings show the Belvedere redesign after a year of cuts. The wave over the highway is gone, the river gesture is smaller, and the money moved to a plaza and a pavilion built from lightposts. It is a better project than the one that got the headlines.
Architecture
The Whale: Arctic Norway's New Whale Centre Opens 3 June 2027
Three hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, a concrete shell clad in local stone is settling onto the rocks at Andenes. Dorte Mandrup designed the building, Ralph Appelbaum Associates designed the nine-room journey inside, and the local whale watching operators helped pay for it.
Travel
Alpine Elegance Meets Golfside Warmth at Guarda Golf
A guest once asked Guarda Golf for a fresh live lobster, fifteen hundred meters up a landlocked mountain. The founder found two. That instinct is why 68 percent of guests come back to this 29-key, family-run hotel on the Crans-Montana plateau, and why we rate it above louder Swiss addresses. Two MICHELIN Keys, a Nicklaus nine at the front door, and a Rhône valley worth staying longer for.
Art
Two Apples, Two Piggy Banks, and a Melting Mastodon: Inside the 62 Proposals for the High Line Plinth
High Line Art has opened all 62 proposals for its 2029 and 2030 Plinth commissions to public comment through September 8. Read together, they are less a shortlist than an argument about what a monument is still for.
Travel
A countryside sanctuary where wellness, community, and heritage meet
Within the rolling South Downs, Long Lane is shaping a new kind of British retreat, a private members club and hotel devoted to deep rest, precise nourishment, and shared ritual. Set at Grade II listed Dunford House near Midhurst in West Sussex, the alcohol free concept promises high design and longevity led programming, from diagnostics and red light therapy to a natural swimming pool among ancient woodland. With its opening now targeted for late 2026, anticipation gathers around a place that pairs English pastoral romance with forward thinking wellness, a union of heritage, quiet luxury, and community that feels both restorative and refreshingly modern.
Architecture
Rotterdam Rocks, MVRDV’s living landmark merges river and city
Rotterdam’s next great cultural beacon has a name that feels like a rallying cry, Rotterdam Rocks. On July 21, 2026, MVRDV won the international competition to design the Shift Embassy, a purpose driven destination planned for the Maas River’s south bank, where seven stacked, rock like volumes will host immersive art, a 200 room hotel, and sweeping public terraces that climb toward the sky. Conceived for the Waterkant district and targeted to open in 2032, this striking biotopic architecture invites visitors to wander from tidal park to rooftop viewpoint while exploring a vivid, optimistic story about climate, circularity, and collective action, all told through experiential design and real time environmental performance.
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The Ritz London
The lion is on the flag outside, on the blue dome over the entrance, and again on the mat underfoot. It repeats in green copper at the corners of the mansard roof, which stands clear of the trees on the Green Park side. The emblem is the hotel's own. Charles Mewès and Arthur Davis raised what amounts to a Parisian apartment block on Piccadilly, granite along the ground floor and Portland stone above, set over an arcade modelled on the Rue de Rivoli that people still walk under coming from Green Park station. César Ritz, who opened it in 1906, meant it to be the most luxurious hotel in the country and held nothing back on the interiors, which run to Louis XVI throughout. Very little about the architecture is English. The rooms keep the Edwardian scheme rather than update it, with period furnishings, richly woven carpets, hand-finished mouldings, and silk on the walls a category up from the 452-square-foot deluxe. Beds are Sleepeezee, which holds a royal warrant of its own, and the marble bathrooms have heated floors. A panel at the bedside works the lights and the blinds. Tea is served five times a day, from half past eleven until half past seven, and no gentleman sits down to it without a jacket and tie. Twenty loose-leaf teas are on the list, sourced by the hotel's tea master, Giandomenico Scanu, who travels out to the plantations himself, and the Ritz Royal Blend is poured nowhere else. Cake comes last, wheeled over on a trolley and cut at the table. John Williams runs the kitchen as executive chef, and in 2025 the National Restaurant Awards named the restaurant their Restaurant of the Year. The Rivoli Bar keeps its restored vaulted ceilings picked out in hand-painted gold. The royal warrant the hotel holds covers banqueting and catering, granted in 2002 and granted again by King Charles III in 2024. He granted the first one too.
Brown's Hotel, a Rocco Forte hotel
Two mosaic panels flank the entrance on Albemarle Street, and each of them names two hotels rather than one, because Brown's took in the St George's that stood on this side of the block. Both names are still on the wall. The hotel opened round the corner at 23 Dover Street, where James Brown added 21, 22 and 24 as the business grew, and it was the Ford family, who bought it next, that carried the place through to Albemarle Street. A room here is still described by what it faces, the inner courtyard or Dover Street or Albemarle Street. Olga Polizzi redesigned the bedrooms, no two decorated alike, and the suites carry names rather than numbers, one for Clara Dow, the English soprano photographed on Dover Street, another for the 1939 ballad about a nightingale in Berkeley Square, a third for the composer Muzio Clementi. Rudyard Kipling arrived on his wedding night and kept coming back for forty-four years, and his suite looks over Albemarle Street. Paul Smith has three bedrooms over Dover Street. The Drawing Room sits at the front behind its original panelling, pouring afternoon tea by day and turning over to jazz on Thursday evenings. The Donovan Bar takes its name from Terence Donovan and hangs his black and white photographs the length of its walls, with a nineteenth century stained glass St George behind the bar. The racier ones are gathered in the Naughty Corner. Charlie's, the restaurant, is named for Lord Charles Forte, and Adam Byatt's menu there keeps roast beef and venison en croute on a gilded trolley, carved at the table, in a room of velvet banquettes. His grandfather worked here before him.
The Langham, London
Griffins and sphinxes sit in the frieze below the eaves cornice, and the lights ranged along the balconies pick them out after dark, when the whole front reads gold. A square belvedere caps the corner of a pile that closes the south end of Portland Place. Lower down, lions and lizards are carved into the window arches. The design competition went in October 1862 to John Giles, a novice who was then pushed into partnership with James Murray for the interiors, and the two ended in court over who owned the drawings. The Earl of Shrewsbury laid the first stone the following July, and the Lucas Brothers had the building up by 1865 for £300,000. Two thousand people came to the opening that June, the Prince of Wales among them, to more than two hundred bedrooms served by thirty-six baths and around a hundred water closets, and a hydraulic lift that carried six people at a time. The water came from an artesian well, and the ground-floor bar is called Artesian after it. The BBC arrived across Portland Place in 1928, considered buying the hotel in 1934, and enlarged Broadcasting House instead. Bombs took out the north-east corner in 1940 and flooded the rest, and the hotel closed. The corporation moved into the empty rooms, made the old dining room its reference library and the Palm Court a conference hall, and bought the building outright in 1965. It did not take guests again until 1991. Of the 380 rooms, the Sterling Suite is the outer limit, a penthouse running to 450 square metres with a private media lounge and space for twelve, while the Infinity Suite is built around a semi-circular sitting room and an infinity bath. Executive rooms and suites carry the Langham Club on the third floor, where the breakfast, the champagne and the evening canapés are included. Dogs up to 20 kilos are welcome, one to a room. Next door on Langham Place, the Wigmore occupies a former banking hall built for Barclays, with classrooms above it for the Regent Street Polytechnic. Martin Brudnizki's studio left the listed panelling where it was and put the furniture in mohair, the menu is overseen by Michel Roux, and the house beer is a saison. Downstairs, the sixteen-metre pool was the vault.
Rosewood London
Candles burn in glass storm lanterns along the High Holborn pavement, set between clipped topiary in square planters beneath a Portland stone front lit gold from below. The building went up to house an insurance company, not a hotel. Arrivals come through an archway, into a courtyard. Pearl Assurance kept its head office here from 1914 until 1989, in an Edwardian Baroque pile listed since 1974. Portland stone and granite run five storeys up from a rusticated base to attics and two more floors of dormers, Ionic columns rise through the middle floors, and leaded domes cap the central tower and both end bays. The insurers also built themselves a staircase in Pavonazzo marble. It climbs all seven floors, restored along with the dome and the listed frontage by EPR Architects for the reopening as Rosewood London in October 2013. Tony Chi and Martin Brudnizki drew the interiors. Seven of the 44 suites are called houses rather than suites, Holborn and Chancery and Lincoln and Cupola among them, and the Grand Manor House Wing runs to six bedrooms across 587 square metres behind a private entrance and its own lift. The wing has a postcode of its own. The courtyard does the work a garden does elsewhere, a summer terrace off the brasserie. Scarfes Bar hangs ten-foot oils of Gerald Scarfe's caricatures on marble walls and rewrites its cocktail list around them every year, while the brasserie keeps more than 320 gins on a copper-topped bar. Cats and dogs stay free, barred only from the spa and the gym. Every restaurant and bar takes them.
The Peninsula
The maples in the courtyard were grown in France, then held a year in a London nursery so they would take to the climate before anyone planted them. They stand in curving bronze planters on the cobbles, jasmine and wisteria climbing the walls above, the house cars drawn up alongside. Hopkins Architects built the place new to sit with its heritage neighbours, and Peter Marino drew the rooms, the lobby and the two floors of spa underneath. All 190 rooms and suites have a mahogany-panelled dressing room and a bathroom of honey onyx. The pictures in them are landscapes, commissioned from more than forty artists at the Royal Drawing School. Higher floors turn towards Hyde Park Corner. The Arch Suite opens Juliet balconies straight onto Wellington Arch from the fifth, while the Peninsula Suite takes 470 square metres of the sixth, with a fireplace and a baby grand in the living room, a private gym, a thirteen-seat screening room and a lift of its own. A pair of binoculars stands on a tripod at its terrace doors. The quadriga on the arch outside is about level with them. Brooklands sits on the eighth floor with a scale model of Concorde hung above the dining room and Claude Bosi's kitchen under it. The bar beside it takes its latticed ceiling from the geodetic airframes Barnes Wallis built at Brooklands, its chandelier from the blades of a Rolls-Royce turbine. Canton Blue does Cantonese on the ground floor, and The Lobby carries de Gournay murals of the Royal Parks. The 25-metre pool sits in a double-height room underground, its walls tiled in mosaic countryside and its light coming from panels in the ceiling. That daylight is manufactured.
Raffles London at The OWO
The four corners were bowed and capped with domes to disguise an irregular site, and the suites below those turrets carry the names of women tied to the building's history, among them the SOE officer Vera Atkins. What opened on Whitehall in 1906 was a Portland stone block of more than a thousand rooms and two and a half miles of corridor, drawn by William Young in 1898 and finished, after his death two years later, by his son Clyde and Sir John Taylor. Churchill ran the department from here as Secretary of State for War, and Ian Fleming drew on the building for the Bond novels. Films followed. The Whitehall door opens on a low hall and then the staircase, which starts in one flight and divides to climb three walls of a compartment domed and glazed to the sky, its steps Piastraccia marble, its balusters English alabaster, its railings Brescia. Thirteen eighteenth-century chimneypieces, bought in 1904 from the department's old premises in Pall Mall, were reset in the offices. Thierry Despont, who had earlier worked on the Statue of Liberty, took the 120 rooms and suites, five of them Heritage Suites in offices that political and military leaders once used. The Haldane, once Churchill's, joins its neighbours into a six-bedroom wing that sleeps twelve. Four floors go to the Guerlain Spa, three of them underground, where a twenty-metre pool sits under a double-height ceiling. The Guards Bar sits in one of the rounded corner pavilions, oak-panelled, its bar stools in red leather, with its own entrance facing Horse Guards. The Spy Bar forbids photography.
