About This Guide

Start with what you can touch, end with the horizon. That sentence decides how every page here is written.

Why each hotel has its own page

Eighteen hotels could have been listed on four long pages, one per section, and for a while that is how guides like this were built. We do not do it that way. A hotel that shares a page with five others is read against them, and the reader ends up comparing rather than looking. Here a hotel arrives alone, keeps its own colour, and the only company it has is a link to the hotel before it and the hotel after it, whichever section those belong to.

The three distances

Every page moves outwards. AT ARM’S LENGTH is the smallest scale: the material of a wall, the blind that closes a capsule, the block of ice a mattress sits on, the shape of a lantern. FROM THE DOOR is the whole building: its age, its plan, what stood here before, how the entrance and the shared rooms are arranged. FROM THE ROAD is the ground it stands on: the street, the shore, the slope, the terminal, and what can be seen of the place from a distance.

The order never reverses, and the three blocks do not repeat each other. If the lantern is described in the first block, it is not described again in the second. The layout carries the same movement: the type gets smaller, the column gets wider and the colour drains away as you go down the page.

Why the near block has no feelings in it

The first block describes how something is made, not how it felt to be there. We are not going to tell you that a bed was comfortable or that a lobby was calm, because that is a report on one night and yours will be a different one. Construction, materials and arrangement stay true for longer than an impression does, so that is what we write down.

What ONE THING TO ARRANGE means

It is a line of preparation, not a complaint. Some things about a place are simply easier if you settle them before you travel: which building your room is in, how luggage reaches a door up a stepped lane, whether the snow halls are standing in the month you have chosen. Naming one of them is not a criticism of the hotel; it is the sentence we would want to read ourselves.

What LAST GONE OVER means

It is the month when we last read our sources for that hotel again and checked that what we had written still matched them. It is not a visit, not an inspection and not a promise that nothing has changed since. It tells you how fresh the reading is, which is the honest version of the same thing.

Where the material comes from

We work from published sources: the hotels’ own material, architectural writing and monographs, museum and heritage documentation, and the public record of the buildings. Two editors have run the guide since 2024, from different countries, and a photographer joins for particular shoots. We do not publish accounts of our own stays, and nothing on the site should be read as one.

What is not published here

No prices, no stars, no scores, no rankings, no opening hours or timetables, no booking, no affiliate links and no paid placement. We take no commission, we do not pass enquiries to hotels, and a hotel cannot pay to be added, changed or removed. A factual correction is free and always was.

Why an international guide has a casino section

Four of the eighteen are casino hotels in Canada, and they are here for the same reason as the rest: they are buildings worth describing. One of them occupies pavilions from a world’s fair. We do not describe or assess the gaming floor, and there is nothing here about odds, promotions or play. On those pages we say plainly that casinos are for adults, and we print the helpline numbers.