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Exqz

Curating exquisite places around the world.

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Guides

Beautiful Speakeasies & Cocktail Bars Around the World

From a book-lined room in Roma Norte to a rooftop high above Paris, these are cocktail bars built around a sense of place. In Mexico City, Librería Valladolid pours classic cocktails among floor-to-ceiling shelves of old books. Abu Dhabi's Saikindō, inside the Four Seasons on Al Maryah Island, pairs crafted cocktails with yakitori and vinyl in the spirit of Japan's listening bars. Windo Skybar serves creative cocktails on the 34th floor of the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile, with views from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe. And on Doyers Street in New York's Chinatown, Apotheke mixes its drinks with house-made tinctures and botanicals beneath vaulted ceilings.

Free · nightlife

Beautiful Hotels in London

London built its hotels on purpose. Six of these seven went up to be hotels and nothing else, four of them in the seventeen years between 1889 and 1906, and only the Old War Office came to it late, after a century of government use. No two were drawn by the same architect, so the thread is an owner instead: Richard D'Oyly Carte opened the Savoy in 1889 beside his own theatre, hired César Ritz to manage it and Auguste Escoffier to cook in it, bought Claridge's in 1893 and had it rebuilt, then dismissed both men in March 1898, after investigators hired by the board found missing wine and spirits and kickbacks from the hotel's suppliers. Ritz put his name on Piccadilly eight years later. The kitchens are the other measure: three Michelin stars at Hélène Darroze, two at the Ritz, two at Brooklands, and one each at Pavyllon, the OWO and the Savoy, where the starred room is called 1890 after the year Escoffier arrived. These are the seven stays worth planning the trip around.

Free · travel · LONDON

Beautiful Hotels in Paris

Paris does not build hotels so much as convert what it already has. Five of these were something else first: a palace Louis XV commissioned for the square that became the Place de la Concorde, the residence of Napoleon's great-nephew, who spent his life on geography and botany, the townhouse built for the Duc de Morny's family on avenue Gabriel under the Second Empire, two early eighteenth-century mansions on the Place Vendome, and the Seine-facing corner of a department store that had stood shut since 2005. The restorations ran under heritage protection that fixes the facades and the listed rooms, so most of the money went where you cannot see it, and the same architect, Richard Martinet, turns up on four of them. The kitchens are the other measure: three Michelin stars at Epicure, three at Le Gabriel, three at Plenitude, six across three rooms at the George V, two at Le Meurice and one at Espadon. These are the eleven stays worth planning the trip around.

Free · travel · PARIS

Beautiful Hotels in Kyoto

Kyoto rewards the traveler who stays inside the city rather than beside it. The finest hotels here were built around something that was already on the site: an eight-hundred-year-old garden laid out for a Taira commander, Edo-period teahouses lifted whole and set back down over a new foundation, the former Mitsui family residence facing Nijo Castle, a thermal spring drawn from the ground below the lobby. None of them rise above the tiled roofs of their district, and the best of them frame a pagoda, a river or the Higashiyama ridge in a window instead of competing with it. These are the seven stays worth planning the trip around.

Free · travel

Beautiful Hotels in the U.S.

The best hotels are destinations in their own right, worth the trip before you've seen anything else. Across the country, from a landmarked tower overlooking the harbor to a desert escape framed by mountains and a Lowcountry retreat that moves at its own unhurried pace, the finest American stays understand that a sense of place is the ultimate luxury. Whether you're after the pulse of the city or the silence of the wilderness, these are the hotels worth planning a trip around.

Free · travel · NYC

Beautiful Resorts Around the World

The best resorts don't just offer a place to stay; they offer a complete reorientation of the senses. Whether perched above ancient waters in the eastern Mediterranean, suspended over the kind of turquoise that doesn't seem real until you're standing in it, or set against a desert coastline where the land meets the sea in shades of amber and rose, these are the properties that make the rest of the world feel very far away. Each one has been designed with the understanding that true luxury is not about what a place gives you, but how it makes you feel.

Free · travel · NYC

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