In Best of the Best, we honour the brands and people behind the most covetable products. Here are the hotels and resorts that top our 2024 list
Safari: Loapi Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa
You wouldn’t expect to stumble upon six cutting-edge glass, steel and canvas structures in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. Unless perhaps you’re within Tswalu, South Africa’s largest private game reserve. The Oppenheimer family, which owns it, has been restoring these lands since 1999. While conservation and sustainability are top of mind here, so are privacy and high design. Loapi, the aforementioned collection of micro camps, is the third and newest addition to this 114,121-hectare reserve.
It offers a private guide, a butler and a chef who can cook everything from tapas to curries to freshly baked bread. The views from the rooms and outdoor terraces are staggering. Grassland and red soil meet the low mountains that jut upward into a cerulean sky. The interiors are stunning, too, appointed with intricately carved wood-panelled walls, cork ceilings and coffee-coloured rounded boucle couches that beg for a post-safari nap.
Luxury adventure: Shinta Mani Mustang, Nepal
You don’t have to leave the remote grounds of Nepal’s Shinta Mani Mustang, the third property in architect Bill Bensley’s eponymous hotel collection, to feel immersed in the culture of this ancient mountain kingdom. Guests can join a monk in the on-site puja room for sunrise chants or partake in a healing session with the resident amchi, an 11th-generation doctor of traditional Tibetan medicine.
The surrounding powder-dusted peaks are perfectly framed in each bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the yak-fur-lined bar serves local apple brandy, and the restaurant’s nine-course momo tasting menu schools guests in the region’s staple steamed dumplings.
But hotelier Jason Friedman, a partner in the project, intended the 29-suite retreat to be a cushy base camp. Guests can enjoy immersive excursions, such as a trek to a medieval village believed to be the last place in Mustang where the pre-Buddhist religion of Bon is still practised, or a lunch of Thakali curry cooked in a local home. The real luxury, Friedman says, is getting to explore a region few people have ever seen.
City Chic: The Fifth Avenue Hotel New York City, the US
For those craving a cosy antidote to sprawling anodyne luxury, the charming Fifth Avenue Hotel has opened its doors at long last. Owner Alex Ohebshalom and designer Martin Brudnizki have transformed a 19th-century McKim, Mead & White building, plus an adjoining new 24-storey glass tower, into a colourful and kaleidoscopically eclectic take on clubby Manhattan hotels of yore. This is hospitality with a point of view—specifically, Gilded Age New York through a heady psilocybin buzz.
Rooms hum with colour, pattern and texture, from pink and pistachio-mint walls to hand-painted bone china to a Murano-glass chandelier dangling a rainbow-hued harvest of fruits. Several of the 43 suites come with terraces; the sprawling Flaneur penthouse includes an outdoor soaking tub and Japanese garden overlooking the skyline. The experience is one of dreamlike intimacy—the feeling that at the end of an ornate, Alice in Wonderland hallway sits your own Flatiron pied-a-terre with 24-hour butler service and an on-demand martini cart in the evenings.
In true high-low New York City fashion, the seductively chic Portrait Bar offers both osetra caviar and a hot dog au poivre. Or head upstairs to Andrew Carmellini’s eponymous cafe, buzzing with art deco glamour, where the longtime star chef continues the reverie, serving his impeccably elevated Italian fare beneath a pair of soaring sculptural trees.
Natural immersion: &Beyond Punakha River Lodge, Bhutan
If you’ve travelled to &Beyond’s African camps, you know to expect the unexpected. Makeshift bars set up near watering holes frequented by elephants and zebras; picnics arranged in the bush as giraffes graze in the distance. So how does the seasoned operator transport that experience to Bhutan? At first glance, &Beyond’s Punakha River Lodge six sumptuous, tentlike lodgings may seem familiar to safari-goers, but the ethos is distinctly local.
Tours lean into the Himalayan kingdom’s rich history and Buddhist traditions: archery lessons, treks to sky-high temples, and visits to secluded mountaintop villages. But the surprises continue. A breakfast spread overlooking a temple might await you at the end of an early morning hike, lunch can materialise on a cliff surrounded by prayer flags fluttering in the breeze, and drinks appear on a sandy riverbank as the sun sets over the 17th-century Punakha Dzong monastery.
Historic conversion: La Palma Capri, Italy
The long-delayed two-and-a-half-year gut renovation of Capri’s oldest hotel, which dates back to 1822, was finally completed last summer. And it was worth the wait. The 50 or so rooms and suites were reimagined by interior designer Francis Sultana in a palette of pale sherbets. They have every possible amenity—yes, that’s a branded bath pillow—and guests receive a generous gift every night at turndown, from cookies to night masks, as is typical at Oetker-operated hotels.
The configurations of the rooms differ wildly, but the splashiest is the 80sqm La Palma suite. Social butterflies will prefer the smaller suites on the second floor (numbers 110 to 115) whose terraces have direct access to the new pool. On an island where sandy beaches are rare, La Palma’s greatest asset is off-site. Its shore club, Da Gioia, is a time-warpishly fabulous hangout offering a jolt of dolce vita glamour, even in mid-summer while crowds throng nearby.
Book the private cove, which can accommodate up to six people and is thankfully close enough to the restaurant to keep the rose flowing. And spend at least one evening at the nightclub in the basement, Anema e Core. The branded tambourines you’ll use to tap along to the house band are the best souvenir.
Updated classic: Maroma Riviera Maya, Mexico
Interior designer Tara Bernerd brought her swaggering style to the multimillion-dollar reimagining of this property, the first of Belmond’s historic North American hotels to benefit from the deep pockets of new owner LVMH. She met the challenge magnificently. Checking into one of the 72 rooms or villas, decorated in a style best described as Mexican mid-century modern, feels like staying at the beachfront home of a sophisticated friend.
The airy spaces are heavy on earth tones, with dashes of turquoise and yellow on details such as the floor tiles—made, like 80 per cent of the decorative elements, in Mexico. The suites are jam-packed with thoughtful touches, too. Take the branded sunglass-cleaning cloth, or the minibar and its full cocktail-making set, plus unisex cotton kaftans (not robes) to wear in the room or on the beach.
The Curtis Stone-helmed restaurant, Woodend, is fine, but the food’s just as good at the hotel’s own all-day spot, Casa Mayor. Make sure to order its Catch of the Day in Molcajete, a tart, corn-studded ceviche of locally caught fish. Better yet, make it two. One won’t be enough.
Renovation: Southern Ocean Lodge Kangaroo Island, Australia
In 2020, wildfires incinerated nearly half of Kangaroo Island, the hardscrabble, beautiful landform off the coast of South Australia. Its premier property, Southern Ocean Lodge, was razed; after nearly four years of renovations, it reopened in December. It’s a credit to the architect, Max Pritchard, that few realise this is a close replica of the original. Suites—the only room category—still project like a tentacle from version 2.0 of the airy, central great room.
And a sense of residential comfort still dominates. There are books everywhere. The dining room doesn’t take reservations. (Guests simply call ahead to say when they’d like to eat.) The central bar is self-service. Want wine? Just walk into the cellar and take what you like. At oversized resorts, they call this sort of thing all-inclusive, but here, it’s just easy, the way it would be at home. Veterans will notice discrepancies.
There are now 25, rather than 23, rooms. The bar is longer. There’s a new four-bedroom suite overlooking the lodge. What hasn’t changed are the daily guided excursions through this resilient landscape, rich with penguins, seals, koalas and, of course, kangaroos.
Southern Ocean Lodge Kangaroo Island
Local charm: Violino D’oro Venice, Italy
Think of this 32-room hotel, which opened in November, as a contrast to the bombastic names that dominate the hotel scene here—one powered by a generosity that only family-run properties can offer. (The jars of candy in the lobby are, dangerously, regularly refilled.) Owner Sara Maestrelli painstakingly restored a trio of buildings minutes from Piazza San Marco, and the gemlike result acts as a tribute to traditional Italian crafts.
There’s glass everywhere, from elaborate Murano-blown chandeliers to the keepsake-like key fobs; the headboards are upholstered in custom fabrics by local textile house Rubelli. Even the gold-leather menu holders are made-to-order by Consani e Giannini. Rooms 21 and 22 don’t connect, but they do share a discreet private staircase, so they’re perfect if you’re travelling in a small group.
Or you can dispense with superstition and book room 13, Maestrelli’s favourite, which sits at the heart of the hotel, with its own private terrace hidden from the hubbub below. And yes, there is a golden violin, though it’s easy to overlook, in a glass vitrine by the entrance.
