Issuu

ISSUE 027 · AUTUMN 2026

THENEW NEW THE SHOULDERSEASON SEASON SHOULDER AFRICA'SPRIME PRIME AFRICA'S SAFARI WINDOW SAFARI WINDOW LUXURYAFLOAT AFLOAT LUXURY

THE TIMELESS CITY Venice proves that standing still in a rapidly changing world can be its own kind of luxury

IN THE ISSUE 08

CHECKING INTO WHAT'S NEXT THE NAMES TO KNOW IN THE MIDDLE EAST'S HOTEL PIPELINE

THE NEW SHOULDER SEASON A CASE FOR VISITING EUROPE’S GREAT SUMMER DESTINATIONS IN AUTUMN

SERVING UP NEW YORK

TIPS FOR MAKING THE MOST OF THE US OPEN, BOTH ON AND OFF THE COURT

RESERVING THE RED SEA NUJUMA SHOWS WHAT RITZ-CARLTON RESERVE DOES DIFFERENTLY

30 THE LATEST EDITION

EDITION BRINGS ITS CITY-HOTEL DNA TO SAUDI ARABIA’S RED SEA

WAKING UP SOMEWHERE NEW

PRIVATE YACHTS, RIVERBOATS AND SMALL SHIPS REDEFINING LUXURY ON THE WATER

BANGKOK FROM ABOVE

ESCAPE TO THE DOLOMITES

HOW THE RITZ-CARLTON BANGKOK SHAKES OFF THE CITY HOTEL STEREOTYPE

AMAN ROSA ALPINA SHOWS WHY ITALY’S MOUNTAINS ARE WORTH VISITING BEFORE THE SNOW FALLS

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FRONT-ROW SEAT TO NATURE’S CATWALK

THE LODGES TO BOOK FOR AFRICA’S DRY SEASON, WHEN WILDLIFE SIGHTINGS COME THICK AND FAST

STEP INSIDE ORIENT EXPRESS VENEZIA AFTER ALMOST SIX CENTURIES, PALAZZO DONÀ GIOVANNELLI IS READY TO INTRODUCE ITSELF

HOW VENICE STILL CAPTURES HEARTS

DEEP IN THE JUNGLE

IF EVER THERE WAS A CITY FROZEN IN TIME, VENICE MAKES A CASE FOR CELEBRATING IT

NO WALLS OR DOORS, JUST 16 BALÉS IN THE RAINFOREST AT BUAHAN, A BANYAN TREE ESCAPE

THE RISE OF THE FARM HOTEL WHY WORKING ESTATES HAVE BECOME ONE OF LUXURY TRAVEL’S DEFINING SETTINGS

LAVISH LAKE COMO GRAND HOTEL VICTORIA PUTS MENAGGIO AT THE HEART OF A LAKE COMO STAY

THE ART OF THE HOTEL LOBBY HOW THE HOTEL LOBBY EVOLVED FROM ARRIVAL SPACE TO SOCIAL CENTRE

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A BED BY THE BEACH AFTER WAITING ALL SUMMER, DUBAI'S BEACH SEASON IS HERE AND MANDARIN ORIENTAL JUMEIRA IS THE PLACE TO ENJOY IT

LUXURY VS EXPENSIVE AN ESSAY ON VALUE, WHAT EARNS THE RIGHT TO BE CALLED LUXURY, AND WHAT IS SIMPLY EXPENSIVE

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editor's letter

ISSUE 027 · AUTUMN 2026

An ode to the detour Whenever I’m asked for travel tips, I tend to give the same answer: rent a car. Anyone who has travelled this way already knows the feeling. There is a freedom in not having to build your day around train times, taxi bookings or where public transport happens to go. A restaurant you spotted online turns out to be nothing like the photos? Leave. See somewhere interesting from the road? Pull over. The plan can change because you want it to, rather than because the timetable allows it. Recently, I spent 10 days travelling across northern Italy, beginning in Milan before driving to Portofino. Four days later, we headed into the Dolomites, then down towards Venice before finishing the trip on Lake Como. Trying to stitch the same journey together around trains, transfers and luggage would have changed it completely. We could pop into a countryside café simply because we happened to pass it. Keeping a swimsuit in my handbag just in case we found somewhere worth stopping for a swim. None of it was particularly planned, and that was exactly the point. There are destinations where a car makes very little sense, of course, but when the road itself can become part of the trip, I will almost always choose it. Some of the best places are the ones you were never looking for in the first place. Next time you travel somewhere new, consider leaving a little more of the journey to chance. And, when you can, take the detour.

Elise

RUME EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ELISE KERR

elise@the-rume.com

MANAGING PARTNER PAULO EDUARDO COSTA paulo@the-rume.com

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER ANTHONY MILNE

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR MANISH CHOPRA

manish.chopra@motivate.ae

LEAD DESIGNER

DOROTHY CASTILLO

CONTRIBUTORS FELICITY CARTER MAX GERSTEIN TAMARA WRIGHT

HEAD OFFICE Media One Tower, Dubai Media City, PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Tel: (+971) 4 4273000 Fax: (+971) 4 4282261 E-mail: motivate@motivate.ae

ON THE COVER

GRAND CANAL , VENICE, ITALY PHOTOGRAPHY CREDIT: AMAN VENICE

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rumemagazine.com @the.rume / @rumemagazine

4 | RUME | Autumn 2026

CHECKING IN From beachfront resorts and desert camps to landmark city addresses, these are the Middle East hotels set to shape luxury travel between now and 2030.

TO WHAT'S NEXT... AMAN DUBAI UAE • Expected opening: 2029 Aman’s first address in Dubai takes a deliberately low-rise approach on the Jumeirah coastline, spreading around 100 all-suite keys and 82 branded residences across nine acres of gardens, shaded courtyards and water features. Guests get a private beach, an Aman Spa and what will be the brand’s largest Aman Club anywhere, complete with indoor padel and outdoor tennis courts.

Corinthia makes its GCC debut on Gewan Island, beside The Pearl-Qatar, with 110 rooms and views over the island’s golf course and beach club. Three restaurants and a spa sit within the hotel, while beachfront villas on Gewan and the Corinthia Yacht Club at The Pearl extend the brand across the wider waterfront.

JAYASOM WELLNESS RESORT, AMAALA Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: late 2026 Sister brand to Thailand’s Chiva-Som, Jayasom arrives at Triple Bay with 153 keys, 24 branded residences and more than 7,000 square metres given over to health and recovery. Programmes pair Western medical practice with holistic therapies rooted in Arabic tradition, covering sleep, hormone balance, detox and metabolic health. Unusually for the category, families are welcomed alongside a separate adults-only zone. 6 | RUME | Autumn 2026

CORINTHIA GEWAN ISLAND Qatar • Expected opening: early 2027

BVLGARI RESORT & MANSIONS ABU DHABI UAE • Expected opening: 2030 Bvlgari is creating its own private-island address off Abu Dhabi, placing the resort directly across the water from Qasr Al Watan. The horseshoe-shaped development will combine 60 rooms and suites with 30 beachfront villas, while a yacht club and 40-berth marina give the waterfront a more residential rhythm. Ninety private mansions complete the island, which will be reached by its own bridge or by boat.

THE MALKAI, SHARQIYAH Oman • Expected opening: October 2027

BACCARAT HOTEL DUBAI UAE • Expected opening: 2027 The desert leg of a three-camp journey from the family behind The Chedi Muscat, with 15 tented pavilions among the Sharqiyah dunes. Guests move between sites by Defender with a personal murshid as guide and storyteller.

The French crystal house arrives in Downtown Dubai with 145 keys occupying the lower floors of a crystalline tower, views running towards Burj Khalifa and Dubai Creek. Expect the maison’s signature red threaded through the interiors, a Baccarat bar and spa, and branded residences above under the La Vie Baccarat service banner.

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WYNN AL MARJAN ISLAND UAE • Expected opening: September 2027 Ras Al Khaimah’s integrated resort will open in September 2027 as Wynn’s first beachfront destination. Across Al Marjan Island, 1,530 rooms and suites sit alongside 22 restaurants, lounges and bars, extensive pools, a marina, theatre and the UAE’s first licensed land-based gaming facility. Punchdrunk, the company behind Sleep No More,

is creating an original immersive production exclusively for the resort, its first in the MENA region, while Delilah is among the venues already confirmed.

CLINIQUE LA PRAIRIE HEALTH RESORT AMAALA Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: 2027 The Swiss longevity clinic, founded in 1931, makes its Middle East debut across 36,115 square metres at Triple Bay. Some 52 rooms and suites and 13 branded residential villas sit around a central Longevity Plaza, organised into four zones following the brand’s pillars of medical care, nutrition, movement and wellbeing. A diagnostics lab, cooking school, museum and beach club fill out the rest, with programmes running from one week upwards.

JUMEIRAH ASORA BAY UAE • Expected opening: 2029 Jumeirah’s home-market strategy has shifted towards smaller properties, and Asora Bay is the clearest expression of it yet. On the La Mer South peninsula, the hotel keeps to 103 rooms and suites plus 20 villas, a fraction of the scale of Marsa Al Arab or Burj Al Arab. Arabesque detailing meets a cleaner contemporary line, with infinity pools, a spa, a members’ club and a hillside enclave of 29 residences stepping down towards the water and the Dubai skyline beyond. 8 | RUME | Autumn 2026

THE ISLAND BY WASL

Wasl and MGM Resorts are bringing MGM Grand, Bellagio and ARIA together on a 10.5-hectare beachfront destination off Umm Suqeim, with all three hotels now targeting Q3 2028. Around 1,400 rooms are planned across four hotel buildings, backed by a lagoon and beach club, restaurants, retail and live entertainment. MGM’s current agreement with Wasl is for a non-gaming development.

MGM GRAND UAE • Expected opening: Q3 2028 MGM Grand will occupy two of the island’s four hotel buildings, making it the development’s entertainment-led anchor. Exact room numbers and venue names remain under wraps.

BELLAGIO UAE • Expected opening: Q3 2028 Bellagio gets a standalone building for its Middle East debut, bringing one of MGM’s best-known resort names to the Dubai waterfront. An individual room count and any local interpretation of its Las Vegas signatures have yet to be announced.

ARIA UAE • Expected opening: Q3 2028 ARIA completes the trio in the fourth hotel building, introducing MGM’s contemporary luxury brand to the region for the first time. It will share the island’s wider mix of beach, dining, retail and performance spaces.

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DISCOVER COLLECTION RAS AMUD Oman • Expected opening: late 2026

The first property from Discover Collection, the members-only brand founded by former Six Senses president Bernhard Bohnenberger, occupies a cape on the Musandam Peninsula with cliffs on three sides and no neighbours. Its 32 villas look across the Sea of Oman towards the Hajar Mountains, and a wellbeing centre called The Sanctuary replaces the standard spa menu with five standalone treatment suites, each with its own thermal facilities. At the centre, a village-style hub brings together the dining venues and communal spaces. Access is by membership only.

FAENA THE RED SEA Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: winter 2026 Faena has built its reputation on theatre, from Buenos Aires to Miami Beach, and its first Saudi property brings that sensibility to the southern edge of Shura Island. All 150 suites and villas come with private pools and sea views, and the wider offering runs to six restaurants, a South American-inspired spa, a holistic healing house and a nightlife venue called The Living Room. Art programming runs throughout. A bridge connects the resort to the golf course, marina and retail on the main island.

RITZ-CARLTON RESERVE RAMHAN ISLAND UAE • Expected opening: 2029 The first Ritz-Carlton Reserve in the UAE, this one takes the form of 50 villas on a secluded island within the wider Ramhan masterplan, between Saadiyat and Yas. Among them are plans for what are anticipated to be the region’s first floating villas, sitting directly on the water, with multiple dining venues alongside.

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CHEVAL BLANC DUBAI (NĀIA ISLAND) UAE • Expected opening: 2029

LVMH’s hospitality maison makes its Middle East debut on a private island off the Jumeirah coastline, set low against the water so the sea and skyline stay in view. The scale is deliberately small at 30 suites and 40 pool villas, with branded residences and estate plots sharing the island and its beaches.

NIKKI BEACH RESORT & SPA RAS AL KHAIMAH UAE • Expected opening: 2029 Nikki Beach takes its beach-club DNA into a more resort-led setting on Hayat Island at Mina. The 156-room property will include suites and sky villas, the latter with plunge pools and 270-degree views across the bay towards the Hajar Mountains, alongside Nikki Spa and Tone Gym.

MONDRIAN ABU DHABI UAE • Expected opening: late 2026 Mondrian makes its UAE debut on the Abu Dhabi Canal, bringing the brand’s more expressive approach to lifestyle hospitality to the capital. Interiors by Tristan Du Plessis pair sculptural forms and flashes of colour with views towards Reem and Al Maryah islands, while 210 rooms and suites sit alongside six dining concepts. A Crystal Lagoon at the water’s edge and a rooftop pool give the hotel two very different places to spend the day. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 11

UAE • Expected opening: Q4 2026

SIX SENSES THE PALM, DUBAI

The brand’s UAE debut is an all-suite property on the West Crescent of Palm Jumeirah, pairing 61 suites with 172 privately owned residences. Wellness dominates, at 60,000 square feet, taking in a Longevity Clinic, hydrotherapy, biohacking and an Alchemy Bar. Four dining venues follow the Eat With Six Senses approach, and there is an Earth Lab on site.

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NOBU HOTEL ABU DHABI UAE • Expected opening: late 2027 Nobu’s first Abu Dhabi hotel sits on Mamsha Al Saadiyat, part of the Saadiyat Grove cluster and looking across towards Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The 126 keys come with a rooftop bar, several pools, a beach club and a wellness centre, and the ground floor will hold the capital’s first Nobu restaurant. Some 88 branded residences share the 50,000 square metre site.

AMANSAMAR

Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: 2027 The name joins ‘aman’, Sanskrit for peace, with ‘samar’, an Arabic term for gathering to share stories and knowledge after dark. An 80-key hotel rises from a desert escarpment near Diriyah, with an Aman Spa, hammam and banya houses, hydrotherapy, a racquet club and several pools. Golf and polo sit within the wider estate.

THE ALBA, DORCHESTER COLLECTION UAE • Expected opening: 2028 Dorchester Collection’s first ocean-adjacent hotel is also its second Dubai address after The Lana. The 95-room property on Palm Jumeirah pairs architecture by Zaha Hadid Architects with interiors by Gilles et Boissier, a major wellness centre and dining that runs from rooftop to beachfront.

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EQUINOX RESORT AMAALA Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: late 2026 The New York fitness brand’s first destination resort takes its performance-and-recovery model out of the city and onto the Red Sea. Adults only, with 128 keys including two penthouses and 21 branded residences, the property is built around an Equinox Fitness Club, a beach club and a rooftop magnesium salt pool. Below ground sit a spa grotto, hyperbaric chambers and IV therapy suites. Menus treat nutrition as part of the programme rather than a side note.

CAPELLA DIRIYAH Saudi Arabia • Expected opening: 2027 Capella’s first Middle East property sits in Diriyah’s Northern Cultural District, overlooking Wadi Hanifah with the mud-brick At-Turaif heritage site in view. The rooms and suites read as contemporary Najdi, and the wellness offering runs to a hammam, a flotation room and a rooftop pool. One royal suite comes with a sky window for stargazing.

JANU DUBAI UAE • Expected opening: 2027 Aman Group’s more social sister brand arrives in DIFC with 150 rooms, seven dining and entertainment venues, 1,700 square metres of wellness space and the first Janu Club anywhere.

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Autumn,

on better terms Europe's finest season is the one most people have already left. Better light, longer mornings and a table when you want one. From Tuscan harvests to Bosphorus evenings, autumn is a season to choose rather than settle for.

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urope’s finest season may be the one most people have already left. Better light, slower mornings and a table when you want one. From Tuscan harvests to Bosphorus evenings, autumn is a season to choose rather than settle for, provided you know which part of it you are choosing. There is a particular pleasure in arriving somewhere that has time for you. The waiter who pulls out a chair and then stays to talk about the wine. The room they move you into because they can. The church you walk into alone, where the painting you came for is simply there, waiting in the light it was painted for. Autumn hands these things back. Not through emptiness, which would be its own kind of failure, but through proportion. The morning is yours to waste. You are given the table you wanted rather than the one nobody else took. A reservation becomes a courtesy again instead of a competition, and the day expands rather than needing to be rationed. The light does much of the work. It arrives lower and softer, flattering stone, water and skin in a way that midsummer glare rarely manages. The heat loosens its hold on the middle of the day, so a city that was a series of dashes between cool rooms

becomes somewhere to cross slowly, on foot, with no particular plan in place. Then there is the part that is harder to name. Places stop performing. A town that spends July being photographed goes back to being a town by October, and you feel it in the way people move through it. Markets belong to the people shopping in them. Restaurant tables fill with locals again. Roads become something to enjoy rather than endure between reservations. None of which makes autumn interchangeable with itself. September is often summer with better manners, generous but not transformed. October is the hinge, when the sea still holds its warmth and cities properly open up again. November asks more of you and gives more back, though only where there is something beyond weather on offer. So the season moves differently depending on where you land. Tuscany holds its nerve across all three months. An island can change character almost completely once the resort calendar thins. A coastline can still feel convincingly summery in one place while 100 kilometres away the loungers are stacked and the shutters have gone down for winter. Tuscany is the easiest place to understand why going later can

ROSEWOOD CASTIGLION DEL BOSCO

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HÔTEL CRILLON LE BRAVE

mean getting more rather than less. September belongs to the grape and the whole region tilts towards it. October brings the olives down. November brings the truffle, which is less a food than a rumour people follow into the woods before dawn. You taste the change before you fully see it. The first oil of the year arrives at the table green and peppery enough to catch at the back of the throat, bearing almost no relation to something that has sat in a bottle since spring. Order the same bread and the same soup you had in July and it will not be the same meal.

The landscape shifts to match. Mist gathers in the folds of the Val d’Orcia early and burns away by mid-morning, so the hills reveal themselves in stages rather than all at once. Florence, in August a city endured between air-conditioned rooms, becomes somewhere to walk through, and its galleries stop feeling like a competitive sport. The countryside does the same, handing back roads that spent summer full of coaches. By November, San Miniato’s truffle market fills the streets and none of it needs to be staged for anybody. The people arguing over price live there. The dogs are working animals. You are welcome but you are not the point, and after a summer of being the point that can feel like a considerable relief. Kitchens follow the fields, which is why the estate hotels are particularly convincing now. At Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco, dinner begins to reflect whatever has just come in, and a meal that opens with the year’s oil and ends once the evening is cold enough to want a fire makes a better case for the region than any swimming pool could. Provence rewards much the same

appetite under slightly stricter rules. Push inland, away from the lavender shorthand, and the season becomes vineyards, olive mills, truffle weekends and the museums of Aix and Avignon. The colour changes, the days shorten and the mistral can arrive without warning, but there is considerably more to do than wait for beach weather to return. Hôtel Crillon le Brave spreads through a small hilltop village above the vines, and its setting begins to make more sense once summer has loosened its grip. Lunch can run long without competing with the heat, walking through the surrounding countryside becomes inviting

again and the landscape feels less like scenery arranged around a swimming pool. Venice takes the season somewhere else entirely. Here, the art is reason enough to stay after summer. The Biennale runs deep into autumn, spilling from the Giardini and the Arsenale into buildings across the city and giving the colder end of the season something more substantial than atmosphere. What changes first is how Venice receives you. The light comes in low off the water and turns the stone the colour it always wanted to be. Fog arrives on some mornings and quietly rearranges the distances. A church or gallery that felt like part of a circuit in August becomes somewhere to linger because there is nobody pressing forward behind you. The water traffic changes too. The vaporetti stop being a scrum, and a seat at the front on a cold bright morning becomes

one of the better things travel offers for the price of a ticket. Delivery barges, commuters and schoolchildren take up more of the view. Even the city’s theatricality feels less rehearsed once there are fewer people watching it. September remains socially busy enough that anyone arriving in search of an empty Venice will be disappointed. It can be a fine month for a first visit and the wrong one for somebody returning specifically to find another version of the city. October is where the balance tips, when the crowds begin to thin without the weather consistently turning against you.

November is moodier and less forgiving. High water becomes more likely, temperatures fall and rain can settle in for a day, yet Venice is one of the rare destinations where poor weather can improve the experience rather than merely diminish it. A wet afternoon becomes a long lunch, several hours inside a palazzo or an excuse to sit somewhere and watch the canal darken outside. Duckboards appear when the water rises, boots come out and the city carries on. Keep half an eye on the tide and the inconvenience becomes part of the story rather than the thing that ruins it. Venice does not need reliable sunshine to justify itself, which is why its season stretches so much further than the beach calendar. Islands need more care. September and October can still offer sea and land together. By November, the experience

VENICE

may have changed entirely, and anyone insisting on a summer version of the same trip risks finding it thinned out and faintly sad, waiting for them. Mallorca makes the shift gracefully. On the northern cape, Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor keeps its pineshaded corner of the island working beyond the height of the beach season, while the Serra de Tramuntana, olive terraces, villages and walking routes give the destination somewhere to go once lying beside the sea stops being the whole day.

By November, more of the island belongs to the mountains, olive terraces, cyclists, village fairs and Palma itself. Coastal openings become less dependable, which means checking rather than assuming, but what remains has more to do with the island than the season built around visitors. Crete is why the phrase “the Greek islands” becomes increasingly unhelpful by this point in the year. A small Cycladic island in November is not Crete. Crete has cities, two airports, serious archaeology, mountains and a food culture

FOUR SEASONS RESORT MALLORCA

October is the island at its most complete. The water is still worth swimming in, the roads have emptied of some of their hire cars and a single day can hold a morning in the sea, a long lunch inland and an afternoon walk without any of the three feeling rushed. Rain becomes possible without becoming the organising principle of the trip. Palma improves at much the same moment. The old town is a place of courtyards and pale stone, and both benefit when the light begins arriving sideways. Restaurants and galleries keep a city rhythm rather than a resort one, so a day that starts by the water can finish indoors without feeling like the weather has spoiled anything.

that was never assembled around a beach club calendar. Early autumn still belongs partly to the resort version of the island. The eastern coast holds onto swimmable water well past the point at which northern Europe has abandoned summer, while Knossos in October becomes a different site from Knossos in July: legible, walkable and possible to absorb without every shaded corner becoming the next destination. Later, attention shifts west towards Chania. The Venetian harbour empties of day-trippers, the kitchens return to cooking more for the people around them and the White Mountains behind the city begin taking their first snow while lunch can still

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happen outdoors below. The strongest late-season destinations tend to have this ability to change without becoming lesser versions of themselves. Once the beach recedes, something else is there to take its place. Cities are particularly good at it because their restaurants, museums and neighbourhoods carry on regardless of the sea temperature. Lisbon and Istanbul do not need a summer calendar to keep them interesting. Autumn simply makes spending the entire day outside considerably nicer. Lisbon softens rather than cools. The hills that punished you in August become manageable, the tiles hold the light differently and the city wears grey weather unusually well. Rain arrives, but there is enough indoors to absorb it without the day turning into a sequence of compromises. The evenings are perhaps the bigger reward. Dinner can start late and stay late because nobody is recovering from a day spent fighting the temperature, and the streets around Chiado and Bairro Alto feel less like a procession between tourist stops. A wet afternoon can disappear into a museum, a tiled church or a long lunch without feeling wasted. Sintra changes with the weather too. The wooded paths around its palaces are transformed by one cool bright morning, and mist between the trees adds more

to the place than an empty blue sky ever could. Autumn does not make Lisbon quiet, nor should it. It simply creates more room around the things you came for. Istanbul gains something similar once the heat lifts from the historic peninsula. The walk between its great courtyards becomes something to enjoy rather than survive in stages, and the Bosphorus carries on making the most ordinary crossing feel like an event worth dressing for. The Peninsula Istanbul occupies the Karaköy waterfront with the old city across the water, and October is precisely when that relationship becomes easiest to enjoy. Breakfast can still happen outside, the afternoon can move between continents and dinner no longer competes with the weather for your attention. The food changes with the season as well. Fish moves through the Bosphorus in numbers, meyhane tables fill early and stay full and long evenings indoors begin to make sense again. Nothing about eating in Istanbul in October feels like consolation for having missed August. By November, hammams become more persuasive, palace interiors reward a grey afternoon and contemporary art gives the day somewhere to go when the sky closes in. Dinner still arrives late. Ferries still cross. The city has lost very little simply because a coat has become necessary.

GRAND-HÔTEL DU CAP-FERRAT

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THE PENINSULA ISTANBUL

The Riviera is trickier, because the coastline does not move into autumn at one speed. Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer and SaintJean-Cap-Ferrat can remain persuasive well into October while more seasonal pockets farther along the coast begin quietly shutting down. There is a particular quality to the light here once the peak heat passes, softer than in high summer and much kinder to pale villas, limestone and umbrella pines. Boats begin to thin in the bays and the coast stops behaving quite so much like a film set. Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat holds the end of the peninsula among gardens and pines, and the setting arguably becomes more appealing once the temperature stops asking everyone to spend the entire day beside the pool. The sea remains there, but it no longer has to carry the trip alone. Nice takes over easily when the weather turns. The old town, markets, museums and coastal paths do not disappear when swimming becomes less dependable, and walking towards Villefranche-sur-Mer is considerably more pleasant when every patch of shade is no longer a survival strategy. By November the water becomes more something to look at than

dive into. Loungers are stacked away, the sea takes on the colder blue it keeps for winter and lunches move above it rather than beside it. Anyone still trying to recreate July may be disappointed. Anyone who came for the gardens, museums, walks and the light through the pines will have lost much less. Sicily has another advantage: it is large enough to move rather than close. September and October belong naturally to the east, to Etna, Taormina and the wine villages on the volcano’s slopes, where the harvest gives the mountain a life beyond the view from a hotel terrace. Etna in October is a working landscape rather than scenery. The vines on black volcanic soil come in late, the air turns properly cold at altitude by evening and lunch in a village on the northern flank can make the drive feel like the reason for the day rather than the price of it. San Domenico Palace keeps Taormina compelling while the east remains the natural centre of the trip, its former convent overlooking the sea from the cliff above town. As the season advances, Sicily simply offers somewhere else to go. Palermo has markets, palazzi, opera and street food that do not require anyone to put on a

FINCA CORTESIN swimsuit. November becomes a different holiday rather than an attempt to preserve the one that existed two months earlier. The Teatro Massimo, the markets and the dense historic centre replace the coastal rhythm without trying to imitate it. The only real warning is distance. Sicily rewards changing base rather than pretending the entire island sits within casual reach. A trip that ignores its scale can spend an unfortunate amount of autumn inside a car. Andalusia waits until later to come into its own. The weather people flee in summer becomes one of the reasons to arrive once the worst of it has passed. Seville in September can still be punishing, and there is little value in pretending otherwise. From the second half of October onwards the city begins to work differently. The Real Alcázar and its gardens stop being scheduled around heat avoidance, and streets that emptied at the wrong time of day become somewhere to wander without calculating the next patch of shade. Granada changes more dramatically. The Alhambra and its gardens are easier to absorb under a lower sun, while cold air drops from the Sierra Nevada after dark and gives the

evening an entirely different character from Seville. Córdoba does the same in its own way. Its patios were designed partly as a response to summer heat, yet later in the year is when sitting in them becomes a pleasure rather than a necessity. Food follows the weather. Autumn restores appetite as much as comfort. Seafood restaurants fill with people who live nearby, olive country moves into harvest and dinner can occupy an entire evening again rather than beginning only once everybody has recovered from the day. Finca Cortesin offers the quieter coastal version. Southern Spain does not suddenly stop being warm, but the intensity recedes enough that being outdoors becomes easy again. The season stretches without anybody having to pretend it is still August. The temperatures vary considerably as you move. Granada sits high enough for evenings to turn sharply cold while Seville remains comfortable much later into the night, and the road between them crosses olive country that resembles neither. A week here can contain several versions of the same season. That is what autumn does best when it is chosen carefully. It

does not reproduce summer at a discount, with identical weather, identical restaurants and half the people. Sometimes it comes close. More often it gives a destination permission to become something else. Rain increases, daylight disappears earlier, ferries thin out and a place can turn peaceful one week and hollow the next. A restaurant you counted on may have closed for the month. A boat may no longer run. A hotel that makes perfect sense in early October can feel isolated three weeks later. The exact week matters more than the generic promise of

shoulder season. September in Mallorca and November in Mallorca are barely the same trip, just as Venice in September and at the end of autumn belong to different moods entirely. Choose the timing well, though, and what returns is choice. Europe does not suddenly become cheap or empty, because it reliably becomes neither. The table, the room, the exhibition and the road simply become available on terms that feel closer to the place itself than to the queue outside it. Summer gives you Europe at its most obvious. Autumn, chosen carefully, gives more of it back.

SAN DOMENICO PALACE, TAORMINA

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N I G V UP R E S

New York A TRAVEL GUIDE TO US OPEN TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS

The 2026 US Open is already under way in Queens, and for anyone still weighing a trip, the better part of it is ahead. The tournament runs to Sunday 13 September at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the 146th edition and, at 22 days, the longest schedule in its near-150-year history. The singles main draws opened on 30 August, leaving the closing rounds and both finals on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September. It is being played in a half rebuilt stadium. Arthur Ashe is midway through an $800 million reimagination, the largest single investment in the tournament's history, which for this year means

2,000 new seats added to the courtside bowl, a promenade concourse 40 per cent larger and two new suite levels, with some spaces temporary until the work finishes in 2027. The second week changes the shape of the place. Singles moves almost entirely into Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium, while the outer courts turn over to the doubles, junior and wheelchair draws, where a grounds pass earns its money. Grounds admission is free on Thursday 10 September, the only free day outside the opening week, and the Finals Fan Fest runs around Louis Armstrong across the closing weekend. On court, the women’s field

arrived with the clearer storyline. Aryna Sabalenka entered as world No. 1 and two-time defending champion, attempting to become the first woman since Serena Williams, who won three consecutive titles from 2012 to 2014, to complete a New York hat-trick. She was joined by each of this season’s other major champions: Australian Open winner Elena Rybakina, Roland Garros champion Mirra Andreeva and Wimbledon winner Linda Noskova. Together, they gave the women’s draw a neat sequence of recent champions, with Sabalenka’s attempt at a third straight title providing the most obvious narrative. The men’s field changed

considerably before play began. World No. 1 and reigning Wimbledon champion Jannik Sinner withdrew on 21 August with a right knee injury, removing one of the tournament’s central figures before the first ball was struck. Defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, meanwhile, confirmed his return after four months out with a wrist injury. His presence restored some of the anticipation around the men’s draw, though his fitness remained an unavoidable question after such a long absence. Alexander Zverev arrived as the reigning Roland Garros champion, adding another recent major winner to a field reshaped by injury and interrupted momentum.

WALDORF ASTORIA NEW YORK

Where to STAY WALDORF ASTORIA NEW YORK

Waldorf Astoria New York returned to Park Avenue in July 2025 after eight years of restoration, a very different proposition to the hotel that closed. What was once a 1,400room property now holds 375 rooms and suites, with private residences above. The Park Avenue lobby has been returned to something close to its 1931 state, with the clock created for the 1893 World’s Fair back at its centre. Dining runs across Lex Yard, a two-floor brasserie from Michael Anthony, the reopened Peacock Alley and Yoshoku for Japanese cooking. On the fifth floor, the Guerlain Wellness Spa covers 22,000 square feet, with 16 treatment rooms, cryotherapy, an infrared sauna, Moroccan hammam and snow cave. The hotel’s restored interiors balance Art Deco grandeur with contemporary comfort, while its central location places Fifth Avenue shopping, Broadway theatres and Central Park within easy reach.

AMAN NEW YORK

Occupying the landmarked Crown Building at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, Aman New York's 83 suites each have a working fireplace, while the spa spans three floors, focusing on diagnostics and recovery as much as massage. The social life sits on the 14th floor, where the Garden Terrace features Arva for Italian cooking and Akari for washoku, including a seven-seat hinoki counter where chef Takuma Yonemaru serves omakase. Both restaurants are reserved for hotel guests and Aman Club members, while the Jazz Club in the cellar is open more widely, with live music and its own entrance on West 56th Street.

AMAN NEW YORK

THE MARK

On the Upper East Side, The Mark works particularly well when the tennis begins to overlap with the city’s September fashion calendar. The hotel occupies a 1927 building at 77th Street and Madison Avenue, four blocks from the Metropolitan Museum, with Central Park equally close. The Mark Restaurant by Jean-

THE MARK

Georges handles the hotel’s main dining room, while Caviar Kaspia sits on the ground floor and terrace suites look out over the park. Its discreet service, polished interiors and central location make it an especially useful base for combining matches, galleries, shopping and late dinners across Manhattan. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 21

FLUSHING MEADOWS

The tennis centre sits within Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a near-900-acre legacy of two World’s Fairs, so there is more reason to stay in Queens than simply arriving for a match and leaving again. The Unisphere is the obvious landmark, built by US Steel for the 1964 fair and rising 140 feet above the park. Three enormous orbital rings circle the globe, representing the tracks of early satellites and reflecting the fair’s fascination with the space age. It sits directly on the walk towards the Queens Museum and remains the clearest surviving symbol of the fair.

What to VISIT QUEENS MUSEUM

Just beyond the Unisphere, the Queens Museum occupies the New York City Building, first constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair and later used by the United Nations General Assembly. Its centrepiece is still the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335-square-foot scale model created for the 1964 fair. Some 895,000 buildings constructed before 1992 appear across its five boroughs, turning the city into something that can be understood in a single room.

MOMA

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CENTRAL PARK

Central Park offers the easier antidote to a full day in the stands. The Mall and Bethesda Terrace cover the landmarks, while the Conservatory Garden at the northern end gives the park a quieter side. Rowboats on the Lake provide the more traditional New York interlude, but the real appeal in early September is simply having enough daylight to cross the park on foot without turning it into another item on an itinerary. The Reservoir loop, Sheep Meadow and the paths towards Columbus Circle give enough direction to the walk without making the morning feel overly planned before the tennis takes over again.

IMAGE CREDITS : JUAN KARMY, JERMAINE EE

CENTRAL PARK

For a Manhattan detour, MoMA has particularly good timing this September. Frida and Diego: The Last Dream runs until 12 September and brings together works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in a theatrical installation developed with the Metropolitan Opera. Downstairs, Peggy Weil: Core

Memory takes over the museum’s 24-foot Garden Lobby screen until 4 October. The installation moves through images of Greenland ice cores and rock extracted beneath California’s Salton Sea, using layers of ice and sediment to make thousands of years of climatic and geological history visible.

LE BERNARDIN

TORRISI

Where to EAT

ON THE GROUNDS

Stadium food is no longer something to work around at the US Open. Cosme joins the tournament for 2026 with Enrique Olvera’s Mexican cooking, including its duck carnitas, while Eyal Shani’s Miznon brings its stuffed pitas and Salt Hank’s arrives with the French Dip that made the West Village sandwich shop a name. The Honey Deuce, vodka, lemonade and melon balls served in its now-familiar souvenir cup, remains part drink and part must-try tournament ritual.

SZECHUAN MOUNTAIN HOUSE

LE BERNARDIN

Le Bernardin is the formal Manhattan counterpoint to a day at the tennis. Eric Ripert’s Midtown seafood room on West 51st Street has kept three Michelin stars without pushing diners into a long tasting menu, with the à la carte running from its signature yellowfin tuna laid over toasted baguette to salmon with horseradish.

THE POLO BAR THE POLO BAR

The Polo Bar has the closest formal connection to the tennis. Ralph Lauren has been the tournament’s official outfitter since 2005, with the partnership now extended to 2032, dressing the on-court officials and ball crew throughout the tournament. The restaurant translates the house into dining-room form: dark wood and equestrian pictures downstairs, with the menu holding to the burger, crab cakes and a corned beef sandwich at the bar.

TORRISI

Torrisi brings a different version of New York energy. Rich Torrisi’s Italian American kitchen occupies the Puck Building in Nolita, a high, handsome room where the waiters wear dinner

jackets and the cooking draws on the city’s immigrant food history rather than any one region of Italy. It holds a Michelin star and remains one of the more convincing expressions of contemporary Italian American cooking in Manhattan.

SZECHUAN MOUNTAIN HOUSE

Szechuan Mountain House is the local answer, one stop up the 7 line from the tennis centre and a few minutes on foot from there, on Prince Street in Flushing. The cooking is Sichuan and unapologetic about heat, with the boiled fish and dumplings in chilli oil doing most of the talking. Its proximity makes it work as naturally for a late lunch between sessions as for dinner afterwards.

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Nujuma , a Ritz-Carlton Reserve On a private island in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea, Nujuma pairs overwater villas, thoughtful architecture and polished service with clear water, unhurried days and a sense of privacy that makes it remarkably easy to disconnect.

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A stay at Nujuma begins well before the first welcome drink appears. Flying into Red Sea International Airport, desert, water and very little else are visible from the air, while the airport itself is small enough that we were outside within minutes of leaving the aircraft. The first sign of how seamless the wider experience would be came with the luggage. Once the team confirmed which hotel we were staying at, our bags were taken care of and we continued towards the resort with only our hand luggage. From the airport, the journey takes around half an hour by road to the marina before continuing across the Red Sea by speedboat. By the time we stepped inside our villa at Nujuma, our luggage was already waiting

for us, despite the fact that we had left the airport before it. It was a simple detail, but one that immediately showed how carefully the arrival process had been considered. Set within the Ummahat Islands, Nujuma was the first Ritz-Carlton Reserve to open in the Middle East. Its name is inspired by the Arabic word for stars, something that initially feels like a subtle part of the resort's identity but becomes meaningful once night falls. Approaching Nujuma by boat gives the first proper sense of the resort. Overwater villas sit low against the horizon, a long jetty reaches into clear blue water and the arrival feels deliberately removed from everything left on the mainland. The comparison with the Maldives is difficult to avoid, although

the architecture and surrounding landscape quickly establish a different sense of place. The team was already waiting as our boat pulled in, with cold towels, biscuits and a chilled interpretation of Saudi coffee. There is no conventional stop at reception. Instead, we were taken directly to the villa by buggy, where check-in was completed inside, while the room key came as a bracelet that could stay on throughout the day. Designed by Foster + Partners, Nujuma uses shell-like forms, pale timber, woven surfaces and sandy tones that sit naturally within the landscape. Regional details appear throughout without becoming overly themed, while the positioning of the villas is as important as

their appearance, particularly once the level of privacy becomes clear. The first thing visible when the villa door opens is the sea. A large living room sits to one side and the bedroom to the other, with the private pool and deck directly ahead. The curved architecture continues inside, where low furniture and built-in elements work with the unusual proportions rather than fighting them, creating a space that feels calm despite its considerable size. Cream upholstery, timber floors, rugs and patterned textiles add enough texture without competing with the view outside. We found ourselves spending far more time in the villa than we would at many other resorts, partly

The Red Sea was almost completely still as the sun dropped, turning from blue to gold and then deep orange while the surface reflected almost every change in the sky.

because it gave us little reason to leave. The outdoor deck is almost another living room, with a generously sized private pool, sun loungers, additional seating and an outdoor shower directly above the water. More importantly, neighbouring villas are angled carefully enough that our sunsetfacing villa never felt overlooked, creating a seclusion that makes the pool genuinely useful rather than simply decorative. The bathroom continues the same sense of scale, although the shower pressure was one of the few details we would have changed, feeling a little gentle for a villa at this level. The following morning began shortly before sunrise, with the moon still clearly visible over the water while daylight was building behind the villa. With nowhere we needed to be, an espresso outside, some reading and a long period of simply looking across the sea felt like the right way to start the day. Late July might seem an unlikely time for a Red Sea escape, particularly for anyone

We found ourselves spending far more time in the villa than at many other resorts. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 25

familiar with summer in Dubai, Doha or Riyadh, but the weather surprised us. Midday was certainly hot, yet mornings and late afternoons were considerably more comfortable than expected, allowing us to cycle, eat breakfast outside and spend the early evening beside the water. Having previously visited the Red Sea in cooler months, we had assumed summer would be best avoided. This stay challenged that. Breakfast is served at Sita, Nujuma's Levantine restaurant and French-style patisserie. The format is mainly a la carte, which suited the pace of the resort, with fresh pastries brought to the table alongside a changing breakfast amuse-bouche. On one morning, this was a tiny waffle topped with cream and blueberries, sweet without being overly heavy. Eggs, pancakes and familiar dishes cover the rest, while the coffee

programme is strong and the barista team clearly knows what it is doing. Sita was also where we had our first dinner, and eventually where we chose to return for our final one. The menu leans into Levantine cooking, and some of the strongest dishes were also the simplest. Hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh and other cold mezze arrived with Arabic bread served hot from the oven, and the hummus was the one we kept going back to: smooth, rich and exactly as

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it should be. A wagyu beef kebab followed, ordered medium rare and cooked precisely as requested, working naturally with the bread and mezze already on the table. A green apple, lime and basil sorbet finished the meal on a refreshing note. Nujuma also takes its zero-proof drinks seriously, with sparkling grape options, wine alternatives and more considered alcohol-free serves, although the drinks designed specifically without alcohol were more convincing than the non-alcoholic wines we tried. Nujuma is considerably larger than it first appears, and cycling around the island on the second day gave us a better sense of its scale. Wooden pathways connect the overwater accommodation before giving way to firmer island paths, while beach villas and residences are spread much farther apart. Despite that size, the resort never felt busy. There were stretches where we cycled without seeing another guest, and the spacing of the villas helped preserve the feeling of quiet even when the property was clearly occupied. Our villa

was close to Sita and the main hub, while restaurants on the opposite side could take five or six minutes by buggy, so the bicycles gave us useful independence. They could've been better maintained, but having them still made exploring the island much easier. By lunchtime, the heat had built enough that eating indoors made more sense. Jamaa and Maia sit together around the beach and pool area, with Jamaa handling much of the food offering while Maia brings in Nujuma's astronomy-inspired approach to drinks. We started with two taco-style dishes, one built around fish and another with slowcooked beef, avocado and melted cheese, followed by a steak cooked to the requested

temperature. It was a good lunch rather than a defining meal, and what stayed with us more clearly was the unhurried afternoon that followed, cycling back to the villa, spending time around the pool and eventually taking a nap. That rhythm became part of Nujuma's appeal, because there is enough to do without any sense that every hour needs to be filled. Dinner that evening was at Tabrah, the seafood restaurant inspired by Saudi fishing traditions. The venue sits farther from the main cluster of villas and restaurants, and arriving early turned out to matter more than anything on the menu. The Red Sea was almost completely still as the sun dropped, turning from blue to gold and then deep orange while the surface reflected almost every change in the sky. The colour stayed long after sunset, spreading across the horizon in pale blue, grey and orange, and it became one of the strongest memories of the stay. Dinner began with a light welcome drink, a small amuse-bouche and bread served with several butters, including one flavoured with seaweed, before we moved into a relatively restrained selection of starters. For the mains, we shared two dishes. The stronger was a saffron and pumpkin risotto with seafood, rich without becoming excessively heavy, with the sweetness of the pumpkin working particularly well with the saffron. Sea bream with elongated gnocchi came alongside and was well prepared, although the risotto was the plate that remained more memorable. At around 11pm, the evening shifted from the water to the sky during Nujuma's guided stargazing session. An astronomer spoke about how stars were historically used for navigation through the desert and their place within Arabic culture, adding context

that made the activity more than a simple telescope session. By the third day, there was little interest in creating an ambitious schedule. After another relaxed breakfast, the morning was divided between the gym and Neyrah Spa. The gym is well equipped for a proper session, while the spa begins treatments with an outdoor ritual using water, flowers and a choice of oils before moving into spacious treatment rooms with intricate timber details. The massage was particularly good, with the therapist clearly paying attention to the consultation requests rather than treating them as a formality. Afterwards, the day returned to cycling, the beach and water clear enough to watch fish moving through the shallows, with visibility that became increasingly impressive as the light changed. Service was one of Nujuma's strongest points throughout the stay. The team was polished and attentive, but what we appreciated most was how easy people were to speak to, with conversations that moved beyond scripted hotel interactions and a warmth that never tipped into excessive familiarity. At this level, service can occasionally become so formal that a noticeable distance develops between staff and guest, and Nujuma largely avoids that.

Three nights felt well judged for a first visit, giving us enough time to slow down properly while still leaving parts of the resort unexplored. For longer stays, the nearby St. Regis Red Sea Resort sits only a short boat ride away, adding another change of scenery and additional dining options without requiring guests to leave the destination. Nujuma makes particular sense for couples, honeymooners and travellers drawn to privacy, design and nature, although its wider appeal is simply the chance to disconnect. There were small imperfections, from the shower pressure and bicycle maintenance to a few dishes that were less memorable than others, but none significantly changed the overall experience. What stayed with us instead were the

uncomplicated moments: our luggage somehow arriving before us, coffee beside the sea while the moon was still visible at dawn, cycling through quiet stretches of the island, watching orange light reflect across perfectly still water and later seeing that same moon through a telescope. Nujuma works best when the resort allows its surroundings to lead. The architecture, villas and service create the comfort, but ultimately it is the Red Sea itself that gives the stay its character.

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Sound, scent & a private On Shura Island, EDITION has brought its city energy to a low-slung beach resort where the Bay Suite is the room to book.

What registers first at The Red Sea EDITION is not the view. For a resort set on the white sand of Shura Island, that is a curious thing to say, but the scent gets there before anything else does. EDITION’s collaboration with the New York fragrance house Le Labo runs right through the property, from the lobby to the washrooms to the amenities in the bathrooms and walking in for the first time is a pleasant sort of ambush. The quality of those amenities is high enough to lift the whole experience, which is not something to take for granted at any price point. Getting there is part of the appeal. Our boat crossing ended at the new Shura Marina, a considerably more polished arrival than the more functional Turtle Bay landing we had used previously, with retail units taking shape along the water. Guests wait for their car in a small lounge closer in feel to a private aviation terminal than a transfer point, tea and coffee poured, good snacks laid out, air conditioning doing its quiet work.

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The drive from there is short. The island itself is worth understanding. Shura is the centrepiece of the wider Red Sea development, a dolphin-shaped island that will eventually hold 11 resorts alongside residences, retail, a marina and Shura Links, the Kingdom’s first island golf course. The pace of change is worth noting: the last time we were on the island a good deal of this was still a construction site, and it has since resolved into mostly finished landscaping, lit pathways and public spaces. The integration is what sets it apart. Everything circles the golf course at the centre, and buggies shuttle guests around on request, so a dinner reservation elsewhere on Shura becomes a matter of asking at the desk rather than arranging a transfer. A channel of aqua-hued seawater threads through the island, which turns walking between points into something you

actually want to do rather than merely something possible. It is a degree of connection across a single island that we have not come across before, and it quietly widens what a stay can include. Nothing here rises high. The buildings keep low and spread wide, and at The Red Sea EDITION the accommodation sits in shell-shaped pavilions of natural oak, coral stone and earth-toned walls. Curved timber battens run out from each entrance and follow the line of the roof, casting shade across the walkways and keeping the air beneath them noticeably cooler. There are 240 rooms in total, including 53 suites, with selected categories adding private pools. The Bay Suite runs to 122 square metres and takes a full shell to itself, sea facing, with the beach a short walk from the terrace. Inside, it behaves less like a hotel room than a small house. A long living room holds an enormous corner sofa, a low table and a television, opening through to a dining area anchored by a generous bench seat, with the minibar and coffee machine

tucked behind. The bedroom is kept deliberately spare: the king bed, a wardrobe and a long floating shelf that doubles as a desk and a place to get ready. The bathroom is the other surprise, finished in fossilised coral stone, with twin basins, a walk-in rain shower with the bath set inside the same wet room, which is a neater arrangement than it sounds, and a separate WC. The shower pressure, for those who care about such things, is excellent. The palette is cream, white and pale timber throughout, and the styling is minimal in the truest sense of the word. There is no gallery wall, no crowd of decorative objects, no furniture for the sake of filling a corner. What there is instead is a good stack of coffee table books in every room, which gives the space a cultural texture without cluttering it, and a great deal of glass. The surroundings are left to do the talking, and on this stretch of coast they are more than capable. Then the outside, which is where the category earns its worth. The

plunge pool

AT THE RED SEA EDITION

The b shape fr uildings take t h om shel ls, low a eir sand in ga oak, cor al stone inst the a nd eart toned fi hnishes.

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plunge pool sits in an elongated oval on the terrace, compact but with real depth to it, and a submerged seat set into one side halfway along so you can sit in the water as well as stand in it. It needed no heating whatsoever. Surrounding it are two sun loungers, a sofa and an armchair, an outdoor shower, and enough planting to give privacy from the beach path without walling out the view. For a longer stay it is a serious proposition. The separation between living room and bedroom is the difference between a hotel room and somewhere you can settle into, and after a couple of days the suite starts to feel like a small home rather than a hotel room. Something of that quality runs down the room categories too. Because every room here opens onto its own outdoor space, even the entry-level rooms have a private villa feel about them, which is unusual at that level. Dining outlet Jiwa takes its name from the Indonesian word for soul, and the beach club is built around water, fire and sound: drums through the afternoon, bonfires at sunset, and a fire show that draws the room at exactly the right moment. It sits

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on the sand beneath a thatched canopy, low white daybeds arranged across timber decking, a boardwalk running towards it through the dunes. Arriving guests are welcomed with rice and flowers in the Balinese manner, a frangipani tucked behind the ear, and for anyone who loves Bali as much as we do, the effect is immediate and disorientating in the best way. The cooking is properly Indonesian rather than gestured at. Skewers arrive in bamboo steamer baskets with peanut sauce and sambal alongside, chicken and beef handled over fire, vegetables treated with as much attention as the protein, and the zero cocktails hold their own next to it. Sunset over the water is reason enough to book the earlier end of service. Better still is the discovery class, a hands-on session with chef de cuisine Made Suriana, who runs through the techniques and spices behind the menu. Sea bass was wrapped in banana leaf with spices and grilled, chicken thigh skewers were built and cooked, and the preparation had been pared back so that guests are not stuck peeling and chopping for an hour. Understanding what goes into the spice paste changes

how the rest of the menu reads afterwards. It also produced lunch, which felt like a generous return on very little labour. Breakfast, lunch and dinner all happen at Central, whose name nods to New York’s Grand Central Station and whose menu leans firmly American: comfort cooking built on local ingredients, an open kitchen and communal tables running the length of the room. The best thing on it is the pizza, made with sourdough and fired in a proper wood oven, and it is good on its own terms rather than good for a hotel. Dinner one night was a tomahawk with mac and cheese and roast cauliflower,

exactly as indulgent as that reads, followed by desserts on an unapologetically American scale. The cheesecake is not for the faint-hearted. On a quieter evening, simple grilled chicken arrived cooked precisely, which in an all-day restaurant matters more than any signature dish. Breakfast is part buffet, part à la carte. The omelettes and hash browns are done well and were worth ordering twice over, though the spread is not one of those overwhelming displays some resorts build, and the fruit was decent rather than exceptional, which is at least partly a question of regional sourcing rather than

of the kitchen. Two small things stood out. A pistachio butter tasted less distinctly of pistachio than expected, which is a shame when the pistachio is the reason you reach for the spoon. And the coffee, cappuccinos in particular, was not made with the precision the rest of the property leads you to expect. Most guests will find it perfectly pleasant; anyone who takes coffee seriously will notice, and a little extra barista training would close that gap quickly. The Spa at The Red Sea EDITION is large, and it is clearly no afterthought. Five treatment rooms, one of them a couple’s suite, sit alongside a beauty salon, a relaxation area and a pool of its own, and the centrepiece is the Recovery Dome, a circular room arranged like a clock face with five stations set around it: infrared sauna, bio sauna, heated stone loungers, a snow shower and a lymphatic shower. The hotel describes it as the first of its kind in the Middle East. Either way, it is the sort of space where an hour disappears without a treatment booked at all. The treatment itself, a Balinese massage, ran differently from the norm. There was no welcome ritual at the feet, no tray of oils to choose from. What there was instead was a consultation taken genuinely seriously: stress marked at one number, sleep at another, a stated preference for something energising rather than sedating, and a therapist who read the form, built the session around it and chose the oil herself, explaining why as she went. Less theatre, more intent. The result was exactly what had been asked for, which is not always how these things go. The extras are the part worth knowing about before arrival. Compression boots for the legs and red-light therapy masks can be borrowed, and the team are happy for guests to take them out to the pool. The changing rooms have hot and cold plunges and heated loungers, and

tea and very good cookies appear after treatments. Notably for the region, several areas including the saunas are shared between men and women, which makes a real difference for couples travelling together and is still uncommon across the Gulf region.

The gym runs to 316 square metres and is open around the clock, properly equipped with Technogym, with indoor and outdoor studios, reformer Pilates and space for yoga. Cycling and weights sessions there were straightforward and well served. Tennis and padel courts sit on site, though in the heat the idea playing is just a thought. Every EDITION lobby is designed to be the heart of its hotel and comparing them across properties is one of the quiet pleasures of the brand. This is among the better ones. It is an open, canyon-like space with a tripleheight ceiling, earth walls and a timber roof, and the achievement is that it feels intimate rather than cavernous. Furniture and planting break it into zones, the sofas are deep and cushioned in white, coffee table books are everywhere, greenery softens every sightline, and a sculptural staircase curves down to Central

with light along the handrail. There is a pool table, as there tends to be at EDITION, and as ever it has been reconsidered rather than simply installed: pale baize, stone surround, a piece of furniture as much as a game. In the evening the room shifts. One night brought a live singer, which turned the hour before dinner into an event rather than a wait, and there is high table seating for larger groups. Tea infusions, pastries and an AperiTea service run through the day, and weekends bring a cocktail reception with a mixology trolley and live music. There is no alcohol at The Red Sea EDITION, in keeping with the destination, and the zero cocktail programme has been built with enough seriousness that the absence registers far less than expected. Outside, the paths come into their own after dark, edged with low lights. The beach is long and quiet, the water genuinely

beautiful, and there are more loungers than there are people to fill them. A water sports centre operates through a specialist partner, with boat trips and wakeboarding among the options, and the main infinity pool looks well designed even if the suite’s plunge pool won our attention for most of the stay. Where The Red Sea EDITION succeeds most clearly is in translation. This is a brand built in New York and defined by urban energy, music and social space, and the version delivered on a Saudi beach keeps that identity intact without importing anything that does not belong. The sound system, set loud enough to feel like the start of a night out, the scent and a lobby that wants to be occupied are all recognisably EDITION, set in a sand-coloured resort where the sea is left to do most of the work. Shura is still evolving around it, but the EDITION already has a clear sense of itself. The coffee needs sharpening and the signature Greek restaurant is still to come. What is already here, though, is a confident property on an island that is becoming genuinely compelling. This is a coastline that rewards timing, and autumn through to spring is the window to plan around. Book the Bay Suite, come for four or five nights rather than two, and let the plunge pool set the pace. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 31

A L

drift in

From tranquil rivers to turquoise seas, these floating retreats offer a stay unlike any other. Wake up surrounded by water, moving at a pace the land cannot manage.

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uxury

THE RITZ-CARLTON YACHT COLLECTION Three yachts now sail under this banner, each all-suite and each fitted with a marina platform that opens at the stern for swimming and watersports. Evrima came first in October 2022 with 149 suites for 298 guests. Ilma followed in September 2024 at 241 metres, and Luminara left Monte Carlo on her first voyage in July 2025 carrying up to 452 guests across five restaurants and six bars. Luminara has since taken the brand to Alaska and Asia.

FOUR SEASONS YACHTS Four Seasons put its first purpose-built yacht to sea in March 2026, leaving Málaga for Malta on a nine-night crossing. She runs to 207 metres across 15 decks, with 95 suites, no interior cabins and a terrace on every one, sold by the suite rather than per person. The 11 restaurants and lounges include an omakase counter and a rotating chef-in-residence programme. She spends summer in the Mediterranean and winter in the Caribbean and the Bahamas, and a second yacht enters service at the start of 2028, with a third ordered for 2031.

ORIENT EXPRESS CORINTHIAN Accor brings the Orient Express name to water 140 years after its first

luxury trains, and the scale is unusual for a sailing vessel. At 220 metres with three rigid sails, Corinthian carries just 54 suites and a maximum of 110 guests, attended by a crew of around 170. Five restaurants and private dining rooms fall under chef Yannick Alléno, with a Guerlain spa, a 115-seat cabaret and an Art Deco speakeasy alongside. Suites begin at 45 square metres, each with a butler and a 3.6-metre window. The maiden voyage left Marseille in June, and a Caribbean season follows from October.

AMANDIRA Aman's Indonesian charter is a 52-metre phinisi, twin-masted and handcrafted from local hardwoods by Konjo artisans, travelling under sail and under motor. Five air-conditioned cabins take up to 10 guests, looked after by a crew of 14 that includes two chefs, a dive master and a massage therapist. Voyages run through Komodo National Park, into Raja Ampat, out to the Spice Islands of the Banda Sea and on to the little-visited Alor Islands. Diving equipment is carried on board, and treatments can be taken in-cabin or on the beach.

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SATORI Built by the couple behind Borgo Santo Pietro in Tuscany, this 41.5-metre wooden schooner was delivered in 2017 and follows 1920s lines, handcrafted in mahogany and warm timber. Five cabins take 10 guests, and one converts into a spa with a steam room and a visiting therapist. A crew of eight sails her, and dinner is often followed by a film on the open-air deck cinema. Charters cover Italy, France, Greece, Croatia and Montenegro.

MARGUERITE, A BELMOND BOAT Les Bateaux Belmond adds a reimagined boat to its Burgundy programme from late summer 2026, rebuilt from the 1962 Amaryllis and renamed after the marguerite daisy that grows across the region. Four double suites hold a maximum of eight guests, alongside an open-plan salon, a private plunge pool and a deck planted with wildflowers and herbs. Menus are curated by chef Dominique Crenn and cooked on board by a private chef. Journeys follow the Saône and take in mustard-making in Dijon, e-bike rides on the Route des Grands Crus and private cellar tastings.

EXPLORA JOURNEYS MSC Group's luxury brand now runs three ships and plans six. Explora I and Explora II each have 461 oceanfront suites, private terraces throughout and six restaurants. Explora III was named in Barcelona on 1 August 2026 and left two days later for Lisbon, the first in the fleet to run on liquefied natural gas and 19 metres longer than her sisters. This winter Explora I works the Caribbean and South America while Explora II stays in the Mediterranean. Three more are expected follow by 2028.

NILE SERAY, AN A&K SANCTUARY A&K's fifth Egyptian riverboat enters service in November 2026 with 32 suites for 64 guests, the smallest measuring 33 square metres with floor-toceiling windows and a waterside Juliet balcony. Two suites add full private balconies and outdoor spa pools. Four-night voyages run between Aswan and Luxor, with excursions taking in the tombs of Seti I, Ramses VI and Tutankhamun, while visits to Amenhotep III or Nefertari may be included subject to availability. An Egyptologist accompanies every excursion. Two restaurants, a spa and a top-deck pool complete the vessel. 34 | RUME | Autumn 2026

SCENIC ECLIPSE Scenic launched the first of its discovery yachts in 2019, and the format has held. Capacity is capped at 228 guests, dropping to 200 in Antarctica, with 114 suites that all have a verandah and butler service. Two Airbus H130 helicopters are carried on board along with the custom Scenic Neptune submersible, both booked separately from the otherwise all-inclusive fare. Elsewhere there are up to 10 dining venues, eight bars and a spa of more than 500 square metres with a salt therapy lounge. A second yacht joined in 2023 and a third follows in 2028.

THE MALTESE FALCON Jumeirah brought this 88-metre Perini Navi into its Privé collection in December 2025. Jumeirah now shapes the onboard hospitality, from dining to wellness. Two decades after her 2006 launch the rig is still the draw, with three rotating carbon masts unfurling 2,400 square metres of sail in six minutes, and films projected onto the lower sail after dinner. Six cabins take 12 guests. She works the Mediterranean in summer and crosses from the Canaries to Antigua this December.

FOUR SEASONS EXPLORER, PALAU This 39-metre catamaran left the Maldives for Palau in October 2023 and now works the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon. There are 11 cabins for 22 guests across three decks, and a shallow draft lets it anchor in channels larger vessels cannot reach. A five-star PADI dive centre sits on board, with up to three dives a day, no minimum stay and guests embarking and disembarking daily.

AQUA NERA The 20 design suites measure 30 square metres apiece, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the jungle, and the crew matches the guest count at 40 each. Aqua Nera has worked the Peruvian Amazon out of Iquitos since 2021, running three, four and seven nights along the Marañón and Ucayali. Chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino sources roughly 70 per cent of ingredients locally. Naturalists lead skiff excursions twice a day, and a plunge pool, spa and screening room occupy the top deck.

BANGKOK FROM ABOVE A stay in the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok's Amaranth Suite, where the bath faces the skyline, the Club Lounge quietly cancels dinner plans and a chocolate soufflé rounds up a seven-course menu.

The Ritz-Carlton Bangkok gives away almost nothing at street level, and that turns out to be deliberate. The entrance on Wireless Road is a modest hall, a few art pieces, some generous floral arrangements and no lobby behind any of it. You take a lift instead. The hotel proper begins seven floors up, and the doors open on a water feature of blown-glass flowers, a marble floor worked into black and white geometry, a run of arched openings framing the skyline, and the low light and dark lacquer of Caleo off to one side. It is a great deal more building than the ground floor was prepared to admit. That withholding turns out to be the organising principle. The hotel occupies a 216-metre tower within the One Bangkok district and runs to 260 rooms and suites, yet it has been laid out so that you almost never see round the next corner. Spaces open sideways rather than straight ahead, so the seating area you took for the end of a room turns out to be the beginning of another. It is mildly disorienting for the first day and then it becomes the point, because a hotel of this size has no business feeling as private as this one does. The other constant is Lumpini Park. More than 500,000 square metres of it sit directly below the building, arranged around an artificial lake with the towers of the financial district rising behind. Almost every room, restaurant and balcony has been turned to face it. Which version you get depends on the side you sleep on, but the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok never turns its back on the green, and the light does a great deal of the work: pale and misty first thing, amber across all that glass by early evening, the park deepening from bright green to something far darker as the hour goes. Reception amounts to two small desks, and the understatement is deliberate. We arrived around lunchtime and were shown to one of the seating areas instead, handed a cold towel and a chilled welcome drink and left alone while the formalities were dealt with somewhere out of sight. It is a small thing that sets the terms for everything after it. The Ritz-Carlton Bangkok would rather come to you than have you stand at a counter.

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The Club Lounge sits on the 23rd floor and makes an even better introduction to the hotel than the lobby does. It is worked in blacks and whites with enough lacquer to land somewhere near art deco, and the view takes in the park and the full run of the skyline at once. The case for the upgrade is volume. Five food and beverage presentations run daily, covering breakfast, a light lunch, afternoon tea, evening hors d'oeuvres and a cordials service with Champagne, wine and cocktails. Written down, that reads as a list of amenities. In practice it rearranged how we used the hotel. One evening we came back with every intention of dining in the city, and looked in at the lounge only to see what was being poured. We never made it out again. Champagne gave way to wine, wine to a pizza that had no business being that good, and somewhere around the fourth bite the reservation quietly ceased to exist. We were in bed early and entirely unrepentant about it. Anyone still weighing the Club rate should price that evening in, because it will happen to you too. The Amaranth Suite runs to 127 square metres in a corner configuration, with two balconies, one off the living room and one off the bedroom. The second balcony is the whole argument for the category. Our best hours of the stay were spent out there in the morning, a small round table and two woven chairs under an

From afternoon light to sunset skies this is the view worth booking

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umbrella, coffee to hand and the park still cool below. Inside, the suite has been arranged to be lived in rather than passed through. A corner of the living room is fitted out for making your own drinks, the walk-through wardrobe carries enough hanging space to unpack a long trip properly, and there is sufficient distance between the sitting and sleeping areas that they read as two rooms rather than one divided by a sofa. Floor-to-ceiling glass runs throughout, so the park is a permanent presence rather than something you cross the room to look at. The bathroom alone justifies booking this category. A freestanding tub sits into a glazed corner with two full walls of glass, the park on one side and the towers on the other. We ran it at sunset and it was the finest half hour of the stay. The city goes amber, the park goes dark green, and nothing at all stands between you and either of them. Very few city hotels can offer that from just a bath. The corridors deserve their own mention. Room doors are black lacquer with a framed panel detail that reads far more like the entrance to an apartment than a hotel bedroom, the lift lobbies are floored in geometric parquet, and the cumulative effect is closer to a well-run residential building than a hotel. It holds true on every floor we happened to visit, which clearly makes it a decision rather than an accident, and it is the clearest thing the design team gets right. Dinner at Duet by David Toutain is the

best thing the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok does, and the hotel is not short of things to do. Toutain holds two Michelin stars for his Paris restaurant and a Michelin star and a Green Star for Feuille in Hong Kong, and the Bangkok room is built on the idea of duality: two elements set against one another in each dish, so that what is written on the menu turns out to be roughly half of what arrives. The room is a greenhouse with 32 seats, around half of them held back for walk-in guests, which keeps the atmosphere lively without the place ever feeling full. Book early in the evening if you can. The hour before service, when the light is still coming through the glass and the planting outside is lit, is the best the room looks all night. The Signature Experience menu runs to seven courses. Alaskan king crab arrived with caviar shadi schrenki, vanilla and kaffir lime, richer and stranger than the description prepares you for. Normandy scallop with cauliflower and XO sauce was paired with a Jura yellow wine, which makes very little sense on paper and a great deal of it in the glass. Brittany blue lobster with brassica and epicea under a homardine sabayon was the most precisely cooked thing we ate all week. When mentioning that we don't not eat foie gras, and rather than simply pulling the pate en croute course, the kitchen sent turbot in its place, cooked well enough that it never once read as a substitution. Hitachi wagyu A4 with tetragonia, kumquat, smoked eel and black garlic was the course that made the

restaurant’s name make sense. Beef and eel pull in the same deep savoury direction, and the kumquat cuts straight through both of them. Then came the trou normand, an apple tatin with Normandy cream and apple elixir, which divided us completely. The final course, 80% Chiang Mai chocolate with buckwheat, passion fruit and cocoa nibs, arrives as three separate things and is worth taking the tasting menu for on its own. The soufflé came out impossibly light with a molten centre, and we would put it against any version of that dish anywhere. The dark chocolate preparation with passion fruit lands very close to a perfect pairing. The third, chocolate pieces with ice cream, is made like the rest of it from single-origin cacao grown

in northern Thailand. An unannounced extra followed, described as petits fours and turning out to be a slice of cake cut at the table with a spirit poured over it. By then we had worked through six glasses of wine and were thoroughly beaten. We ate it anyway. One small moment says more about the service here than the menu does. Midway through the meal one of us asked for fresh lemon juice with water, which is not a request that appears anywhere on a tasting menu. A few minutes later it arrived in its own small pot, unprompted and unremarked upon. Lily's, the all-day dining room at the RitzCarlton Bangkok, sits on the same floor as the

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pool and pulls exactly the same trick as the rest of the building. The entrance suggests something modest, then you turn the corner and it keeps going. Four live stations cover pastry, hot food, a dedicated Thai section, and fresh juice, fruit and coffee. The Thai station is the one to prioritise if you only have one plate in you. The room looks empty when you walk in but it's not. Everybody is around the corner, out of sight of the door, in the part you cannot see on arrival, and by the middle of service it is busy. Come early if you want the window tables, which are worth having even from this height, with the park directly below.

There are two pools, one indoors and one outdoors, and the outdoor one on the seventh floor is the one that matters. It is long enough to swim properly in and runs to an infinity edge that drops the water straight into the skyline. The terrace divides sensibly, one long side carrying a run of loungers that hold the sun until late in the day, the other given over to four-poster cabanas with considerably more shade and a good deal more privacy. We had cloudy afternoons for much of the stay, which suited the cabana side far better than the sun side, and the pool is a different place in the morning from the one it becomes at the end of the day. The half hour before sunset is the one to plan around. The sky over the towers turns orange, the water picks all of it up, and it is the best view the hotel has anywhere below the 23rd floor. Bangkok is very good at hospitality in a way that resists being written down. The professional standard at the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok is exactly what the brand promises, but what stayed with us afterwards is how little of it felt like procedure. Staff start real

conversations in the lift rather than delivering a greeting and then studying the floor indicator. Requests are taken without any suggestion that they are an inconvenience. Set against a good many European hotels at this level, technically excellent and slightly cold with it, the difference is significant, and it is why a hotel that reads as sleek and urban on paper feels warm the moment you are inside it. Is the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok worth it? Yes, with two conditions attached. Book a category with a balcony, and take the Club access. The rooms without outdoor space are still good and the view is still the view, but the balconies are what turn a well-designed hotel room into somewhere you want to spend a morning, and the Club Lounge quietly absorbs at least one dinner and every breakfast. Between them they change the shape of the stay rather than merely improving it. What the Ritz-Carlton Bangkok has built above Lumpini Park is a hotel that behaves like a very good apartment, in a city that rewards having one.

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Heritage, hikes & a slower rhythm at

AMAN ROSA ALPINA

Heading into the mountains towards San Cassiano to see how the Dolomites' bestknown hotel wears its new Aman identity.

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Aman Rosa Alpina is a rare thing within the Aman portfolio, a hotel with 86 years of its own history behind it. Founded in 1939 by Engelbert Pizzinini as a family-run inn in San Cassiano, Rosa Alpina passed through generations of the same family before closing for a complete transformation. It reopened on 24 July 2025 as a fully fledged Aman, with the Pizzininis still involved in its story.

The redesign, led by longtime Aman collaborator Jean-Michel Gathy, replaces the old Alpine timber warmth with a quieter, more minimalist reading of mountain living. Pale wood, natural stone and floor-to-ceiling glass now define the 51 rooms and suites, while a two-level Aman Spa, indoor and outdoor pools and a clutch of new dining concepts complete the picture. The setting surprises first. There

is soft and low, the styling clean without feeling cold, and books and framed prints keep it feeling lived in. The details are where Aman Rosa Alpina tells its story. The room key taps onto a wall panel carved into the silhouette of a mountain, and that same jagged profile reappears etched into the bathroom walls, a quiet thread running through the design. Elsewhere, raw stones gathered from the surrounding Dolomite peaks sit as sculptural objects to admire on shelves and surfaces, grounding the pale, contemporary interiors in the geology just outside the window.

is no sweeping private driveway here; Aman Rosa Alpina sits directly on San Cassiano's main street, facing the church that anchors this small Ladin village. Step inside and the mood shifts at once. The lobby is tall, dark and softly lit, divided by monumental pillars, with daylight pouring through glazing that frames the forested slopes opposite. The drive up is part of the experience too. Climbing from the valley towards San Cassiano, the farmhouse architecture edges towards Austrian and Germanic styles, a reminder of how layered this corner of Italy remains. Small touches make it feel like a home rather than a showpiece. Bowls of walnuts, complete with nutcrackers, are dotted around the lounge. Our welcome amenities included a raspberry cake almost too pretty to cut, followed the next day by delicate pastries shaped like coffee beans. Both disappeared quickly. Our Rosa Alpina Suite, one of two measuring up to 136 square metres, unfolds as an elongated open-plan living space in beige and pale timber. A dining table for six sits at one end, a generous

lounge area at the other, with a walk-in wardrobe and two private balconies. The proportions are the first thing you notice, and they explain a great deal about the new Aman Rosa Alpina. Suites face one of three outlooks, the mountains, the village street or the church, and the mood changes with each. Ours looked towards the peaks and made a persuasive case for an afternoon of doing very little, armed with cheese, wine and the region's excellent salumi. The furniture

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Warmth comes from the hearth. Beneath the television sits a gas fireplace convincing enough to pass for the real thing, its flames flickering over faux logs below the screen. A handful of rooms go further, keeping traditional wood-burning fireplaces that staff will lay and light on request, stacking the logs the oldfashioned way. Two rooms have been preserved entirely in the original Rosa Alpina style, from the pale timber doors inwards, a charming reminder of the hotel's first life. The heated outdoor pool, roughly 25 metres long, anchored our first afternoon. What began as a bright, sunny day turned suddenly to rain, and rather than retreat indoors we stayed in the water, swimming slow laps as mist gathered over the peaks around us. It is the kind of small, unplanned moment that lingers longer than any itinerary, and it captured exactly why the mountains reward a slower pace.

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The wellness spaces are cleverly arranged so nothing feels far away. A jacuzzi runs a few degrees warmer beside the main pool, while the indoor pools, sauna, steam rooms and a bracing cold plunge sit close enough that moving between hot and cold takes only seconds. In winter, when the terrace gives way to snow, that tight, wellconnected layout will come into its own. Across two levels, the spa at Aman Rosa Alpina counts seven treatment rooms and three pools, giving the wellness offering real depth rather than the token gesture some mountain hotels settle for. It is one of the strongest reasons to stay put on a grey, drizzly afternoon, and it makes the property feel like a destination in itself. Our one reservation concerns pace. Service around the pool ran slower than we have come to expect from Aman, and an extra drink or a small request took

longer to reach us than it should. It is a minor flaw in an otherwise polished operation, most likely a matter of a young team still settling into a new building, and the kind of thing we would expect to smooth over as the season goes on. Il Salotto, the double-height lounge bar complete with a ladder for reaching top-shelf whiskeys, changes character entirely as the day fades. On our first night it was calm and intimate, a place to settle in near the fire. By the second evening it had come alive, a pianist playing older, traditional tunes beneath Brigitte Niedermair's mountain tapestries as the room filled with an easy, sociable hum that is rare to find inside an Aman. The cocktail list rewards curiosity. We ordered a gin Basil Smash and the Strawberries Love, a clarified strawberry number lifted with elderflower cordial and a gentle carbonation, both arriving with those same exceptional olives and a bowl of nuts. Il Salotto also serves plates through the day for anyone reluctant to move on, while the Di Vino Room, a handsome

private space for wine-led dinners, went firmly on the list for a return visit. Dinner at Enju proved the highlight of the stay. The intimate Japanese restaurant is built around authentic shabu shabu, served across three set menus of rising ambition, and we chose the Hana. It opened with a dashi marinated octopus appetiser and a silky chawanmushi before the main event arrived, thin cuts of Tuscany Grey meat, local wagyu beef striploin and Alto Adige chicken thigh laid out ready for the pot. Each diner chooses a broth, and we split a spiced chicken and a milder chicken option so we could taste both, cooking the meat and a bright spread of seasonal vegetables tableside. A battery of condiments, sesame, ponzu, chilli oil and spicy daikon among them, let us build each mouthful to taste. Hokkaido ramen cooked in the same broth rounded things off before a light strawberry dessert, and the wine pairing was faultless. Mornings begin in the Heritage Room, hushed and intimate with views to the forest, and it is

hard to imagine a lovelier spot for breakfast once the snow arrives. The spread pairs a compact buffet of local cheeses, ripe tomatoes and burrata with a full à la carte menu, a step up from the à la carte only approach at some other Aman properties. Summer here is made for walking, and the concierge points guests towards trails for every level. The gentlest starts almost at the door, an easy riverside path that follows the water down through the valley, passing a series of weathered bronze figures set among the trees along the bank. Aman equips walkers properly, lending branded backpacks and steel water bottles, both of which can be purchased in the lobby boutique. A higher trail the next day rewarded the effort with wider views, and at the top of the cable car above San Cassiano we stopped for a very good macchiatone at a rustic mountain restaurant at around 2,000 metres. Getting there is half the pleasure, the drive and the walking revealing how sharply the landscape shifts, the Ladin and

Germanic influences of Alta Badia layered over an unmistakably Italian setting. Not every hour needs to be spent outside. When the weather closes in, the hotel keeps guests occupied with a games-stocked living room of chess and dominoes, three private cinemas that can be booked out, a children's playroom with table tennis and a cigar lounge. Our visit coincided with the football, and while a cinema screening was not possible, the team happily set us up to watch the match in the cigar lounge instead. Aman Rosa Alpina rewards guests who want the brand's calm with a stronger sense of place than most of its resorts can offer. It is a slightly different proposition from the classic Aman, shaped by almost a century of history rather than built from nothing, and that history gives it a character all of its own. Winter brings the slopes of Dolomiti Superski, while summer belongs to hikers, cyclists and anyone happy to watch the weather roll across the peaks with a glass of local red in hand.

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FRONT ROW TO

Nature • THE LUXURY GUIDE TO AFRICA’S SAFARI SEASON •

September and October sit in a particularly rewarding window across much of Africa, when dry-season wildlife viewing remains strong and the first seasonal shifts begin. By November, returning rains and moving herds create a different kind of safari. 44 | RUME | Autumn 2026

Wilderness Mombo Camp MOREMI GAME RESERVE, BOTSWANA Chief's Island sits at the point where the Okavango splits into its main channels, and the wildlife density here is the reason Mombo has long been called the place of plenty. Eight double tented suites and a family unit are raised above the floodplain that rarely empties, each with a copper bath, private plunge pool and outdoor sala, while the shared Sanctuary adds a lap pool, sauna and meditation cocoons. Lion, leopard and wild dog are all resident, so September and October can deliver exceptionally concentrated game viewing as waters recede.

Wilderness Bisate Reserve MUSANZE, RWANDA Four villas of 212 square metres each make up the entire guest capacity here, set within walking distance of sister lodge Wilderness Bisate but out of sight of it, and arranged so that every excursion runs privately with no other guests attached. Thatch, basket weave and timber reference royal Rwandan building traditions, and each villa opens onto a viewing deck with a wood-fired hot tub facing six dormant Virunga volcanoes. There is a mud room for trek preparation, a climate-controlled wine tower and three fireplaces, and Early September brings the driest forest conditions for tracking one of the park's 12 habituated gorilla families.

A&K Sanctuary Gorilla Forest Lodge BWINDI NATIONAL PARK, UGANDA This is the only luxury lodge inside the gates of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, which means the walk to the trailhead is measured in minutes rather than hours and gorillas occasionally wander through the grounds. A complete rebuild finished in 2025 brought 10 suites, an expanded

main lodge and a refurbished spa, almost all of it made by local hands, so the walls are woven from banana fibre, the roofs are papyrus thatch and the lobby chandelier is strung with rolled paper beads. Leica binoculars come with the room, the Explorers Lounge runs nightly talks on conservation and culture, and Bwindi's 350-plus bird species reward anyone who lingers between treks.

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Singita Lebombo Lodge KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, SOUTH AFRICA Singita's 33,000-acre concession runs along the eastern edge of Kruger towards the Mozambique border, and Lebombo occupies a ridge above the point where the N'wanetsi River cuts through it. The 13 glass-walled suites were modelled on the eagles' nests built into the cliff face below, so each one reads as a lit box of glass, timber and steel with a deck wide enough to sleep on beneath nothing but mosquito

netting. Two two-bedroom suites link together to form a four-bedroom villa for families travelling as a group, and it is the only part of the lodge that takes children under 10. The wine cellar is among the most serious in the country, and the Community Culinary School and Conservation Lounge are open to guests. Guided bush walks and stargazing sit alongside the drives for further immersion.

One Nature Nyaruswiga SERONERA, TANZANIA

Time + Tide Chinzombo

LUANGWA RIVER SOUTH LUANGWA NATIONAL PARK, ZAMBIA Six villas sit under ancient msikizi trees on 60 acres of private frontage along a curve of the Luangwa River, with the national park directly across the water. Canvas, timber and reed replace concrete and brick entirely, and every villa has a plunge pool, a soaking tub and a verandah where elephants pass close enough to interrupt breakfast. The camp carries the Norman Carr walking safari lineage, which still shapes the guiding, and late September into October is when leopard, wild dog and elephant concentrate hardest along the drying riverbed. 46 | RUME | Autumn 2026

The Nyaruswiga Hills wrap around this camp in the central Serengeti, and the Seronera River below holds water all year, which keeps resident lion, leopard and cheetah close long after the migration has moved on. There are 14 canvas tents on eucalyptus poles finished with brass crowns, ranging from 91 square metres to 178 for the two family tents, each with a wood-burning stove and a private patio. A pool with a swimup bar, a jacuzzi and a telescope for stargazing round out an unusually comfortable camp, and November is when it makes most sense, as the herds begin drifting back south.

Angama Mara

MAASAI MARA GAME RESERVE, LOLGORIEN, KENYA Angama means suspended in mid-air in Swahili, which is more or less what the lodge does, sitting 1,000 feet up on the Oloololo Escarpment with the Mara Triangle spread out below. The property is split into two identical camps of 15 tented suites, so it never feels like a 30-suite lodge, and each suite runs up to 100 square metres with an 11-metre wall of glass across the front. The 700-hectare site has its own forests and 1.2

kilometres of Rift Valley frontage, and a private road drops guests straight down into the Mara Triangle, where vehicle numbers stay low. No suite claims a better view than another, since all of them are spread along the same edge of the Rift Valley. There is even a photographic studio with camera hire and tutorials, guided walks along the crest of the escarpment, and in September the herds and the river crossings may still be running.

Lolebezi JEKI, ZAMBIA

Singita Kwitonda Lodge

VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK, KINIGI, RWANDA

Kwitonda takes its name from a silverback known for his gentleness, and the lodge sits on 178 acres of rehabilitated farmland on the park boundary, close enough that Sabyinyo, Gahinga and Muhabura fill the timber-framed windows. Eleven suites, nine one-bedroom and two two-bedroom, each have a heated plunge pool, indoor and outdoor fireplaces and an in-room treatment area, with the four-bedroom Kataza House alongside for exclusive use. Local stonemasons, weavers and ceramicists shaped the volcanic rock, woven ceilings and hand-fired brickwork, and the on-site Akarabo Nursery supplies the indigenous trees for reforestation work that is extending gorilla habitat.

African Bush Camps built Lolebezi on five hectares with a kilometre of Zambezi frontage, and the suites are designed to float above the ground so floodwater can pass beneath them. Steel frames, glass, canvas and reclaimed hardwood sleepers make up the structure, while woven reed ceilings, hand-carved doors and a circular curtain of wooden beads and embroidered netting around each bed soften it considerably. Four signature suites and two family suites take

a maximum of 16 guests, all airconditioned with private plunge pools and thatched salas facing the river. The dining pavilion is built from reclaimed railway sleepers and runs an all-day café alongside the main kitchen. Beyond game drives there is canoeing, boating, walking and seasonal catch-and-release fishing, plus a spa, gym, yoga deck and open-air cinema, and the dry months to the end of October are when elephant and leopard sightings peak.

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Londolozi Game Reserve GREATER KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, SOUTH AFRICA The Varty family have held this stretch of the Sabi Sand since 1926, which makes 2026 Londolozi's centenary year, and in 1993 it became the first game reserve anywhere to be granted Relais & Châteaux status. Five camps share 16,000 hectares of traversing and a ranger and tracker team with roughly 350 years of experience between them. The three Private Granite Suites, set above the Sand River, are the most exclusive of the five.

Singita Mara River LAMAI, TANZANIA

The Lamai Triangle is the northernmost corner of the Serengeti, and Singita's camp of six tented suites overlooks a bend of the Mara River within 98,000 acres of it. Two of the six are family tents, Maasai geometric patterns and locally made furniture keep the mood light, and the whole camp runs off grid on solar. There is a spa tent, a fire pit and a plunge pool for the hours between drives. Crossings are never guaranteed, but September puts guests as close to them as any address in Tanzania.

Mara Plains Camp NAROK, KENYA Dereck and Beverly Joubert built Mara Plains in riverine forest on a bend of the Ntiakitiak River, inside the 35,000-acre Olare Motorogi Conservancy on the northern boundary of the Mara. The canvas suites are raised on recycled hardwood decks and finished with Lamu wood doors, copper baths and brass detailing, among them the two-bedroom Jahazi Suite with its

own pool. The conservancy holds one of the highest concentrations of big cats in Africa alongside the lowest vehicle density in the region, and guests traverse roughly 100,000 acres across conservancy and reserve, with night drives permitted on the private side. Every suite comes with a professional camera kit and Swarovski binoculars for the length of the stay, and the images are sent home afterwards through a private gallery. September brings the migration and November brings the resident cats with far fewer people.

Xigera Safari Lodge MOREMI GAME RESERVE, BOTSWANA Xigera, pronounced kee-jera, first opened as a water camp in the 1980s and reopened as something closer to a gallery, holding what the lodge describes as the largest private collection of contemporary African art in hospitality, with more than 100 commissioned pieces and work from around 80 designers across the continent. The 12 suites stand on stilts so that wildlife and

floodwater pass underneath, and each takes its name from the flora of the Delta. Arrival is across an elevated bridge over a papyrus channel. There is an air-conditioned library, a spa, a yoga pavilion and the Baobab Treehouse for a night out under the stars, while access to permanent channels and lagoons means mokoro and boat safaris carry on when drives alone would not.

Duba Plains Camp KAKORO, BOTSWANA

Great Plains has the private Duba Concession to itself, and the camp Dereck Joubert designed for it borrows the shape of a 1920s safari camp, with five tented suites on recycled railway sleeper decking under giant ebony trees. Each has a plunge pool, a day bed and air conditioning over the bed, and a separate two-bedroom suite comes with its own vehicle, guide, butler and chef. Buffalo herds and daylight-hunting lions are the draw.

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ORIENT EXPRESS

VENEZIA

Inside a 15th century

Venetian Palace

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Arriving the way Venice intended The octagonal staircase in the centre of the hotel was worth lingering on too, rebuilt step by step during the eight-year restoration with a few sections deliberately left showing their missing pieces. The walls upstairs did not meet at perfect right angles either, and in a building this old that felt right rather than wrong, a sign of age rather than a fault. Our suite faced the canal, and its

e arrived at Orient Express Venezia the way the palazzo intends, by boat, the city sliding past on either side as we came in off the canal. The building has stood here since 1436 as a private home and later a picture gallery, and until it opened in April 2026 no hotel guest had ever spent the night inside it. Someone was already waiting on the water steps as we drew alongside, ready to take the line, and the façade revealed itself slowly above us, seven Gothic windows catching the last of the afternoon light. A private water entrance was once a mark of real standing in Venice, and being received this way, rather than walking in off a street, set the tone for everything that followed. The first room we stepped into was dark, low and a little mysterious, the reception desk so understated we barely registered

it. A member of staff walked us through, and the palazzo opened into its lobby, the Corte del Conte, a former courtyard now full of daylight. After the shadow of the entrance, that cinematic brightness is the most quietly theatrical thing the hotel does. We were shown to a deep velvet sofa, brought a drink and left to take everything in, the marble underfoot, the flowers, the bespoke Murano chandeliers overhead. The coffee exactly as we’d requested, and somewhere in the background the paperwork quietly took care of itself. We kept noticing things. A detail in the floor, then the ceiling, then the carving on a door we had already walked past twice, until an hour had gone and we hadn't moved. It is that kind of room, and by the end of the stay we understood why some guests barely make it out to explore the rest of Venice at all.

walls and ceiling were covered in restored historical paintings, classical and mythological figures looking down over the bed. Blush pink ran through the whole room. We had meant to unpack straight away and instead spent the first stretch just standing there, heads tipped back, taking in the painted figures above us before we did anything else. Orient Express Venezia has 47 rooms and suites, six of them signature suites with their own

frescoes, marble fireplaces and canal or garden views, and no two are alike. Small things made the room feel considered, chocolates and fruit set out with real care, and Venetian biscuits we ate with a macchiato at the window, watching boats work their way along the water below. If we had one small note, it was the furniture. The suite came with a full dining table, pleasant enough for morning coffee,

though we would happily have traded it for a smaller table and a proper sofa to sink into. The television, cleverly, hides behind a mirror and disappears completely the moment you switch it off, leaving the room to its own century. The bathroom is all marble, more contemporary than the bedroom but never at odds with it, and the walk-in shower gave us the biggest practical surprise of our stay at Orient Express Venezia.

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simple. What arrived was precise without ever trying too hard, the kind of cooking that trusts its ingredients. We started with burrata, tomato and basil cream, familiar and beautifully done, with bread soft enough to be worth mentioning. Then came the plin filled with baccalà mantecato, the dish of the night for both of us, delicate and refined and yet carrying all the quiet comfort of a really good plate of pasta. The blue lobster linguine that followed was cooked exactly right, orange zest lifting it rather than weighing it down, and the braised Venetian beef in Amarone came with grilled pak choi, the greens cutting cleanly through a rich sauce. Nothing across the whole meal looked better than

The water pressure was remarkable, the sort you rarely find in a new hotel let alone a palazzo begun in 1436, and there is a marble bench built in to sit on. We had wondered whether a canal-facing room would be noisy, and it was not, at all. Little of the city reached us through the walls, and boats, footsteps and neighbours were all inaudible, and the only thing that reached us was the thunderstorm that broke over Venice after dark. We ended up at the window for a long time, watching rain hammer the stone and lightning throw the whole palazzo into sharp relief. It made for one of those evenings you do not plan and always remember. When we finally drew the blackout blinds the room went completely dark, the bed was as good as the setting deserved and the room stayed silent, and we slept far longer into the morning than we had meant to, which felt like the building doing its job

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rather than us being lazy. Orient Express Venezia is not a large hotel, which is much of its charm. We spent part of the afternoon simply exploring it, finding salons, statues and a quiet room lined with old books soft with age that guests are welcome to take down and read. Elsewhere a chess set sat waiting, its pieces blown in Murano green and blue, asking to be played. There is real history in the walls of Orient Express Venezia, from the frescoes to the salon where scientists gathered here back in the 1840s, and it gives the place the feel of a small museum you happen to be sleeping in. We stopped later at the Wagon Bar, a snug Art Deco room built to echo an Orient Express carriage, for cicchetti and a cocktail as the light went. Dinner was at La Casati, the allday restaurant, a charming room of green walls, marble floors and soft pink detail that opens onto the garden in warmer weather. The menu was short, which we liked, and we kept our choices

it actually tasted, which is rarer than it ought to be. Save room for the tiramisu. It arrives not as the usual dense square but as a light, playful dome, creamy within and hiding a biscuit layer beneath, and it vanishes alarmingly fast. If you would rather not head up to bed feeling heavy it is the one to order, and we would happily have started again from the top. In the end it was the service that made the evening rather than any one plate. Our waiter talked us through the wine and the thinking behind each dish, then drifted into how Venice shifts with the tides and why its boats are built so flat. None of it felt rehearsed, and all of it made the meal feel properly rooted in the city around us.

The palace that waited 600 years For almost six centuries, Palazzo Donà Giovannelli belonged to nobles, dukes and artists, yet not a single traveller had ever spent the night here as a hotel guest until Orient Express Venezia opened its doors in 2026.

The kind of history you can fall asleep inside

That warmth ran right through our stay at Orient Express Venezia. Ice for the champagne appeared within minutes of asking, and one of the team who showed us around turned out to be Venetian, which meant the building stopped being a list of features and started connecting to the city outside. The gelato spots he sent us to were the ones locals actually use. Two things were not open yet. The Spa is still to come, drawing on Roman thermal bathing, Venice’s maritime past and Ottoman hammam ritual, and Heinz Beck Venezia, the 20seat restaurant from the threeMichelin-starred chef, opens in September 2026. We knew this before arriving, and if anything it only handed us a reason to come back before too long. We took breakfast out in the garden, which after the night’s rain was the loveliest area in the building. The food was à la carte

and nicely done, macchiato, pancakes, fruit and warm bread, but it was the setting that stayed with us, striped parasols and marble tables under a bell tower rising just beyond the wall. A garden this size is a rarity in central Venice, and coffee in it while the city wakes is one of the real pleasures of staying at Orient Express Venezia. Just outside, Strada Nova puts cafés and an aperitivo a minute’s walk away, while Cannaregio keeps you clear of the crush around Piazza San Marco, a short stroll off rather than a pricey boat ride.

We left the way we came, by boat, though not before a last coffee back in the Corte del Conte, the room we kept returning to. Gliding out along the canal one final time, it struck us that we had spent barely a night here and yet felt oddly reluctant to go, which does not happen very often. Orient Express Venezia will suit anyone who already

knows Venice and wants to feel it differently, who cares about old buildings and how they are brought back to life, and who would rather stay somewhere small and singular than somewhere large and exhaustively equipped. We would not call it the best hotel in the city on the strength of one night. We will say it changed how the city felt.

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48 hours in

VENICE

Venice rewards travellers who slow down, which is the opposite of what 48 hours tends to encourage. Two days is not long in a city assembled across 118 small islands, and the temptation is to move quickly between the landmarks rather than to notice what sits just to one side of them. This guide leans towards the second version. It takes in the workshops where velvet is still woven by hand, the furnaces of Murano and the lagoon islands where the republic began, and it lands in early autumn, when the Regata Storica turns the Grand Canal into a racecourse and the film world decamps to the Lido. Designed as a reference rather than a schedule, it covers where to focus across two days.

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Orient Express Venezia

Grand Canal

WHERE TO STAY Venice has no shortage of grand, opulent hotels, though the ones worth the outlay tend to offer what the city itself withholds, which is room to breathe. Gardens, water gates and private landings count for more here than floor area, and the three properties that follow each solve the problem of arriving in Venice in a different way.

Aman Venice

Palazzo Papadopoli has stood on the Grand Canal since the 1560s, and Aman Venice occupies it with only 24 rooms and suites, which is a striking ratio for a building of this scale. Guests arrive by boat at the palazzo's own landing, into a reception hall rather than a lobby. Frescoes by Giovanni Battista

by Heinz Beck and centres on

Tiepolo survive across the reception rooms of the piano nobile, several of which now serve as bedrooms, so a handful of guests sleep beneath 18thcentury ceilings that most visitors to the city will only ever see behind a rope. Leather wall coverings and carved fireplaces have been kept in place. Two private gardens sit either side of the palazzo, a rarity in Venice, and one opens onto the Grand Canal for alfresco dining in warmer months. Arva, the

hotel's Italian restaurant, buys from the Rialto market and the lagoon islands, and there is a three-suite spa, a gym and a roof terrace above.

Orient Express Venezia

One of the newest luxury properties in Venice opened in spring 2026, when Palazzo Dona Giovannelli became a hotel for the first time in almost six centuries. The 1436 palazzo sits in Cannaregio where two canals meet, and the seven carved Gothic windows above the Rio de Noale are attributed to Filippo Calendario, the architect behind the Doge's Palace. Eight years of restoration produced 47 rooms, suites and residences, six of them signature suites, set among recovered murals, sculptural ceilings and the original passageways and ballrooms. Arrival is by private boat through a 15th-century water gate, or on foot through a discreet door into the Santa Fosca garden. Dining is overseen

La Casati, which looks onto the internal garden and borrows its name from the marchesa who once hosted parties here. The Wagon Bar draws on the golden age of rail travel, and there is a spa and gym below.

Hotel Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel, Venice

Crossing to Giudecca changes the character of a Venice stay entirely, and Hotel Cipriani sits at the island's eastern tip with a complimentary launch running to St Mark's Square around the clock, so the trip takes about four minutes. What it offers is more space than on the main islands. There is a heated saltwater pool of Olympic proportions, gardens, a small vineyard and a tennis court, alongside 95 rooms and suites. The 15th-century Palazzo Vendramin annexe is the most residential option, with views back towards the Doge's Palace. Oro holds a Michelin star, Cip's Club puts tables out over the water facing San Marco and Il Porticciolo covers lighter poolside lunches. The Casanova Wellness Centre handles treatments, sauna and steam. The hotel runs seasonally and closes over winter, so autumn dates are worth confirming early.

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DAY 1 Canals, craftsmanship and the city at its oldest

Grand Canal

Waterborne grandeur

Every arrival in Venice eventually resolves into the same view. The Grand Canal runs for just under four kilometres in a reversed S through the middle of the city, lined with palazzi built between the 13th and 18th centuries, and it is still a working waterway rather than a monument to itself.

Only four bridges cross it, so the quickest way to read the city is from the water. Vaporetto line 1 covers the full length with frequent stops, while a traghetto crossing on a stripped-back gondola remains the cheapest way to travel by oar. On the first Sunday in September the canal clears for the Regata Storica, which pairs a costumed procession of historic boats with

a series of hard-fought rowing races. The gondolini final is the one Venetians care about, and the banks fill hours in advance. This year it falls on 6 September. Early mornings, regatta aside, belong to delivery barges and commuters.

Doge’s Palace Venetian statecraft

IMAGE CREDIT : MARCELLO ROCCHESSO

Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua Centuries-old craftsmanship

A short walk from the Grand Canal in Santa Croce, one workshop still weaves velvet as Venice has for five centuries. Bevilacqua was formally founded in 1875, though the family appears in city records as weavers from 1499, and it works on 18th-century looms bought from the silk school of the Venetian Republic. The house speciality is soprarizzo, a velvet that alternates cut and uncut pile to create depth, woven by hand at a rate of a few centimetres a day. Guided visits to the mill run by appointment, and the fabrics turn up in La Fenice, Santa Maria della Salute and Palazzo Papadopoli. 56 | RUME | Autumn 2026

For almost a thousand years this was the seat of the Venetian Republic, housing the doge, the senate, the courts, and the prisons under one Gothic roof. The standard route takes in the Scala d'Oro, the Chamber of the Great Council and an enclosed crossing of the Bridge of Sighs. The Secret Itineraries tour is the better use of an hour, opening the chancery rooms, the interrogation chambers and the cell Casanova escaped from in 1756. It books out well in advance, particularly in September.

St Mark’s Basilica and Crypt Spiritual landmarks

IMAGE CREDIT : ÖZGÜL BENDES

Some 8,000 square metres of gold mosaic line the domes and vaults, laid down across centuries and best seen when the interior lights come on rather than in flat daylight. Behind the high altar sits the Pala d'Oro, a Byzantine altarpiece set with close to 2,000 stones. The crypt below is closed during normal opening hours and can only be reached on an evening visit, when a custodian unlocks it. High-water marks from earlier floods are still legible on its walls.

WHERE TO DINE

Club del Doge Canal-front fine dining

The terrace at The Gritti Palace holds one of the best positions on the Grand Canal, looking straight across to the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. Club del Doge takes over the waterside tables from 7pm, with executive chef Alberto Fol building menus around Veneto produce and fish from the lagoon. The same terrace serves lighter lunches earlier in the day, and the outdoor tables run from April to October, weather allowing, with an interior dining room for the rest of the year. Book well ahead for a table on the water during festival season.

Ristorante Quadri

A table above the piazza One floor above Grancaffe Quadri on Piazza San Marco, Quadri has been run by the Alajmo family since 2010 and holds one Michelin star. Chef Sergio Preziosa cooks lagoon fish, shellfish and vegetables grown on the island of Sant'Erasmo, and the dining room was reworked in 2018 by Venetian craftsmen. Tables are limited, and the windows over the piazza are worth requesting when booking.

Bar Longhi

Timeless cocktails

Also at The Gritti Palace, Bar Longhi trades on a small mirrored room and a Grand Canal terrace, with a martini trolley wheeled to the table and cicchetti, the Venetian answer to tapas, for late grazing. The wild fennel martini is the house signature.

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DAY 2 Beyond Venice, into timeless island life

Seguso Historic glass furnace

The Seguso family has worked glass on Murano since 1397, across 23 generations, and the furnace opens for guided visits by appointment. These take in the history of the island, a demonstration by a master glassmaker and, at the end, the chance to blow a piece. Techniques on show include sommerso, the layering of coloured glass that the house is known for, and incalmo, the joining of two blown forms while both are still hot.

Rio dei Vetrai and Palazzo Barovier & Toso Glassmaking district

Murano's furnaces have lined the Rio dei Vetrai since 1291, when the Venetian Republic ordered every glassworks off the main islands to reduce the risk of fire and, conveniently, to keep the trade's secrets on one small island. Glassmakers were required to live there in exchange for privileges. Barovier&Toso traces its own line to 1295 and keeps its historic premises on the Fondamenta dei Vetrai. Across the water on Fondamenta Manin, Palazzo Barovier&Toso occupies a 1920s building, more than 900 square metres over three floors, given over entirely to chandeliers and light. The Venice Glass Week each September is the easiest opportunity to get inside and see the working furnaces.

Venice began here. Settled in the fifth century by mainlanders fleeing invasion, Torcello grew into a town of thousands before malaria and a silting lagoon emptied it, and only a few dozen residents remain. The silence is the first thing visitors notice. What survives is remarkable. The Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta is the oldest building in the lagoon, founded in the seventh century, and its west wall carries a vast Last Judgement mosaic. Beside it stand the round church of Santa Fosca, a marble seat known as Attila's throne and the parapet-free Devil's Bridge. The campanile is worth the climb for the view across to Burano.

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IMAGE CREDIT : MUSEO DI TORCELLO

Torcello Ancient lagoon settlement

WHERE TO DINE

Locanda Cipriani

IMAGE CREDIT : SALMEN BEJAOUI

Garden sanctuary

Burano Colourful fishing island

Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry's Bar, opened this inn on Torcello in 1936 so that his Venice guests had somewhere to escape to for lunch, and the arrangement has barely changed. Tables are set in a walled garden under a pergola, and the kitchen keeps to Venetian classics. Ernest Hemingway stayed here through the autumn of 1948 while working on Across the River and into the Trees, and the property still keeps a handful of rooms for anyone who would rather not catch the last boat ride.

Burano is the lagoon's most photographed island, and the colours are not a marketing invention. Each facade has to be repainted in a shade held on the municipal register, which is why the palette holds together across the whole island rather than tipping into chaos. The island's craft is needle lace, worked with a needle and thread rather than bobbins, and the technique known as punto in aria was prized across the European courts from the 16th century. The Museo del Merletto on Piazza Galuppi occupies the former lace school. Nearby, the campanile of San Martino leans hard enough to invite comparisons with Pisa.

Lunch on Burano means risotto di go, made with goby caught in the lagoon and cooked slowly in fish stock.

Suso Artisan gelato

Suso has been making gelato near the Rialto since 2010, using pastry techniques and short ingredient lists, with vegan and gluten-free options alongside the classics. The pistachio is the one to order. Queues build through the afternoon at the Sotoportego de la Bissa shop, so the second branch on Salizada San Giovanni Grisostomo is the quieter bet.

GLAM Enrico Bartolini Contemporary fine dining

Behind an unmarked gate in Santa Croce, the 15th-century Palazzo Venart holds two gardens, one of which opens onto the Grand Canal. Glam sits in the former orangery, a glazed room facing a courtyard shaded by a century-old magnolia, and holds two Michelin stars, the only restaurant in Venice to do so. Enrico Bartolini oversees the kitchen with resident chef Donato Ascani, who has held the post since the restaurant opened in 2016. Menus are built on lagoon fish and vegetables grown on the islands. There are roughly six tables, so booking is essential, and arriving by water at the palazzo's landing is the better approach.

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Immersed in

Bali's Wild Heart

BUAHAN

A BANYAN TREE ESCAPE Sixteen open-air villas dissolve into the rainforest north of Ubud at this adults-only Banyan Tree retreat, where the walls come off, the birds run the pool and disconnecting is the entire point.

uahan is a property that reveals itself slowly. Tucked into the forested highlands north of Ubud, near the village it takes its name from, the resort sits so far out of sight that arriving feels less like checking in than being let in on a secret. It lies roughly two hours from the airport and a good deal further from anything resembling a crowd. There are just 16 open-air villas here, scattered across a steep shoulder of jungle at 600 metres, and the overriding feeling on arrival is one of rare privilege: not many people get to book a place like this, partly for the price and partly because there is simply so little of it. What sets Buahan apart from Bali’s betterknown jungle lodges is how much deeper into the trees it feels. Most of the island’s nature retreats gather in and around Ubud itself; this one sits beyond, in wilder, denser country, yet the seclusion is more sleight of hand than hardship. The access is not actually complicated, just a little further out, and the resort is so cleverly arranged that you feel gloriously cut off when, in truth, you are not. For an adults-only retreat built entirely around the idea of disconnecting, that is exactly the trick worth pulling off. The approach bears no resemblance to a conventional hotel arrival. You pass through a gate and drive a few hundred metres through the trees, and the welcome begins with the resort’s arrival ritual: a heavy wooden block, sounded to mark your coming and traditionally struck three times. A smaller version sits outside every villa and serves, rather charmingly, as the doorbell. There are two welcome teas, one brewed from a plant the team harvests fresh each day and said to be good for the circulation, alongside little energy balls of coconut and nuts that taste far better than their virtuous billing suggests. From there it is a walk to the villa, and

walking is the operative word. Getting around is done on foot, along cobbled paths that climb and drop through the forest. It is part of the magic, but it comes with a caveat: anyone with limited mobility would find Buahan a genuine challenge. Our villa sat a minute from the central pavilion, which we came to appreciate, as some of the further balés involve steep and uneven descents. The heart of the resort is a soaring two-level timber pavilion, open on all sides to the valley. The lower level houses Open Kitchen, the single restaurant that feeds the whole property, while above it sit a lounge and The Botanist Bar, where a long communal table runs the length of the room. Everything is built from thick, heavy, natural wood, and the structure seems to grow straight out of the hillside, looking down over the forest and the resort’s main infinity pool. The villas, or balés, take the resort’s “no walls, no doors” philosophy at its word. There are no walls to speak of, no doors, and no locks; the team calls it the ‘Naked Experience’, and it takes a moment to recalibrate to the idea that nothing solid stands between you and the forest, a form of open-air living Bali has quietly made its own. A simple swinging gate marks the entrance and can be bolted from the inside, while the small wooden block doubles as a doorbell so staff announce themselves before stepping in. There is even a woven tag to hang out when you would rather not be disturbed. Inside, the layout flows in a single uninterrupted line: a small outdoor table at the threshold, then a living area with sofa and coffee table, a four-poster kingsize bed and finally the bathroom. A central timber washstand holds twin basins beneath a carved round mirror, and to either side a mazelike spiral wall wraps around a private nook, one holding the

double shower, the other the lavatory. There are no doors, but because each spiral turns you back on yourself, both stay completely private. The hand-hammered copper tub, meanwhile, sits out on the open deck beneath vintagestyle brass taps, open to the forest and the weather. The materials are the quiet star, all teak, bamboo and thatch, chemical-free and as honest as the setting demands, down to the bamboo clothes hangers and the soap and shampoo that smell faintly of the garden they came from. Buahan’s idea of a minibar leans into the same spirit. A complimentary ‘Bali-groni’ waits in the villa, served with ice and a little kit of herbs and spices to adjust the profile to your taste, which is a rare and rather lovely touch. The coffee comes measured into glass test tubes that you tip into a filter, the beans grown so close by that they carry a faint note of the tangerines cultivated alongside them. Each balé also comes with a Curiosity Box of maps and local games, and an Adventure Kit of torch, lantern, ponchos and lemongrass repellent for setting out into the grounds. A word on the question all this open-air living tends to raise: mosquitoes were barely an issue. The resort sets out a natural repellent, but with water running through the forest and the waterfall nearby, there is little standing water for them to breed in, and we picked up far fewer bites here than elsewhere in Bali. So for all the missing walls, no one is going to be eaten alive. By evening the villa transforms. Turndown drapes a mosquito net over the bed, lending it a soft, canopied, almost fairy-tale quality, and the heavy curtains are drawn around the open sides to make the space feel smaller and more cocooned. The highland air cools

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sharply after dark, so the team lit our fire pit on request, and we worked through a bottle of locally vinified red beside it as the temperature dropped. When the bed felt cold, they delivered not extra blankets but an entire second duvet, gloriously heavy, the kind of weight that knocks you straight to sleep. There is even a clever arched canopy above the bed that channels cooled air down over the sleeper, a neat answer for rooms that cannot rely on conventional air conditioning. If the villa is the heart of a Buahan stay, the private pool is its soul. Rather than chlorine or salt, the pools are filled with spring water and rise to a gentle, swimmable temperature that, in the cool of the highlands, feels close to perfect, a world away from the junglefringed infinity pools elsewhere around Ubud. The water is so clean and natural that it draws a remarkable crowd: every morning, and on and off through the day, dozens of small birds gather along the infinity edge to drink, bathe and squabble, sometimes 40 or 50 at once. It is, quite literally, a pool party, and one of the most charming things we have witnessed at any hotel. The only catch is that the same birds double as an alarm clock, arriving at around 5:50am each morning. The pool also delivered the single most memorable few hours of our trip. A heavy tropical downpour rolled in and held for two or three hours, proper drumming rain, and we sat in the warm water watching it fall through the forest. Later we ran the copper bath, lit by those vintage taps, and let the steam rise as the storm carried on around us. With no walls between us and the weather, and only the deep overhang of the roof keeping the rain out, the whole thing felt entirely cinematic. Not a drop made it inside, which says a great deal about how cleverly the villas are built.

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There is a larger main pool down by the pavilion, ringed with vintage-style parasols in vibrant fuchsia, but we didn’t get the chance to use it. Our own pool was so good, and so private, that the grand communal one

remained, as far as we could tell, largely a beautiful piece of scenery. Among Buahan’s quieter luxuries is a waterfall within the grounds, reserved entirely for guests and reached by a 20-minute descent into the valley. We set off early, before 7am, and although the resort suggests going with a guide, they were happy to let us head down alone with a pair of walkie-talkies and a few essentials, ready to call for help if we needed it. We appreciated being trusted rather than chaperoned. The path was slick after the previous day’s rain and steep in places, but manageable, and the reward was a forest rock pool fed by a cascade running far stronger than usual after the storm. It is precisely the kind of cinematic, deep-innature spot that makes the climb back up worth every step. Every meal runs through Open Kitchen, and proximity is the kitchen’s guiding

principle. There is a working farm on site, with vegetables and chickens, and the team forages and sources as much as it can from within the grounds or close by, reaching further afield only when it must. Lunch was the high point of the cooking. Corn fritters, a dish that turns up all over Bali and never wears thin, arrived crisp and fresh; a sesame-crusted tuna steak came with rice crackers; and the simpler plates, a burger and a properly made pasta, did exactly what they should. The quality of the fresh pasta in particular caught us off guard in a place that's so remote. Dinner is where opinions may divide. Alongside the à la carte there is a set menu, served only in the evening, that is roughly 70 per cent plant-based, with just a single dish offering a meat option. We are not especially plant-based eaters, and while the plating was beautiful and the service warm, several courses landed wide of the mark for

us, a raspberry dessert in particular arriving so sharp and sour that it defeated us. The quibble is less about the cooking, which is clearly accomplished, than about choice. If the concept were avowedly plant-based that would be one thing; as it stands, an optional protein with each course, or simply a few more choices, would make a real difference, especially for guests staying several nights who quickly find the same dishes coming round again. When the kitchen is on form, it is very good. The one meat option we tried, a beef cheek braised for 48 hours, was meltingly soft if a little fatty for our taste, and the bread, served with an excellent lime butter, was good enough that we ate far too much of it. The standout, though, was a chocolate mousse with brownie that we would happily have ordered on repeat, easily the best thing we ate all stay. Breakfast changes often and runs to a short menu, supplemented by a counter of fresh fruit, pastries and breads. The cappuccino was excellent, which matters enormously to us, and the fruit was exceptional, the passion fruit, watermelon and fresh coconut water all bursting with flavour. A charcoal-black waffle with miso butterscotch was the one miss, less for the taste than for the very long wait before it appeared. Timing hiccups aside, the produce is the real headline, and worth lingering over. Buahan’s spa is unlike most. Rather than a single building, it comprises four individual treatment rooms dispersed across the property, each completely private. There’s no spa reception and no waiting area; your therapist collects you from your villa and

walks you to whichever room has been chosen for you, which you do not lay eyes on until you arrive. Ours opened straight onto the valley, metres from the waterfall, and the view ranked among the most beautiful we have had from a treatment table. The ritual began, as Balinese treatments often do, at the feet, though here they were scrubbed up to the knees with a fragrant blend of ground rice, cacao and honey that smelled extraordinary. The treatment itself was sleep-focused, all long, slow, soothing strokes rather than deep work on the muscles; it will not release a knot, but that is not its aim, and as pure relaxation it was wonderful. The wider programme runs to yoga, sound healing and meditation, which works in keeping with a property that takes rest seriously. For groups who would rather have the place to themselves, Buahan can be booked in full. Through the resort's Exclusive Escape Buyout, all 16 balés are given over to a single party on a minimum two-night stay, an arrangement pitched at intimate gatherings, wellness retreats, private celebrations and corporate trips. It runs on a full-board basis, taking in daily breakfast, lunch and a five-course dinner at Open Kitchen, sunset cocktails at The Botanist Bar, and a rolling programme of activities from waterfall treks and forest bathing to yoga, jamu workshops and rice-field immersions. Also included are a spa credit and a separate experiences credit of USD 2,000 each per stay, private return airport transfers, a shuttle into central Ubud, in-balé snacks and seasonal fruit, and a resort phone with round-the-clock access to a personal Escape Host. Rates start from IDR

290,000,000, or approximately USD 18,480, per night, with a two-night minimum. What stays with you about Buahan, beyond the setting, is the warmth of the team. The service could hardly be warmer; staff learn your name almost at once and cannot do enough for you, and even the general manager came by to join us for a drink to talk through the experience and, tellingly, to ask for honest feedback. This is still a young property, and it has the feel of somewhere actively refining itself, which makes the few rough edges easy to forgive. It will not suit everyone. The walking and the steps rule it out for anyone with mobility issues; the limited menu and the largely plant-based set dinner may frustrate guests staying longer or those who like to eat widely; and the remoteness, the whole point, means this is not a base for ranging across the island. But – and this is a big but – for travellers who want to genuinely disappear, to swap noise and walls and schedules for rain, birdsong and forest, Buahan, a Banyan Tree Escape is a remarkable place. It is among the loveliest stays we have had in Asia, and one of very few we would happily return to, which, given how many tempting new openings there are to see, is about the highest compliment we can pay it.

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The Rise

of the

FARM HOTEL Once the modest preserve of the agriturismo and the country inn, the working farm has become one of the defining settings of luxury travel. From Cape wine estates and Umbrian castles to alpine sheep stations, we consider why the world's most admired hotels now grow, raise and make what they serve, and what comes next.

Reschio Hotel 64 | RUME | Autumn 2026

here is a moment, at a certain kind of hotel, when the property begins to explain itself through food rather than architecture. It may be the butter at breakfast, churned from the milk of the estate's own herd. It may be a basket of eggs left outside the farm shop, a jar of honey labelled with the name of a meadow, or the sight of a gardener crossing the lawn with the evening's vegetables. Nothing is announced. It's the land that does the talking. Increasingly, that moment takes place on a farm. Across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, a generation of hotels has been organised around productive land: vineyards and olive groves, dairies and orchards, tea gardens and sheep stations. These are not country hotels with attractive grounds. They are working

agricultural estates that also offer some of the most sophisticated rooms, restaurants and service in the world. The category now has recognised leaders. Babylonstoren, in South Africa's Cape winelands, surrounds its historic Cape Dutch buildings with extensive productive gardens, wine and olive oil production, a bakery, a cheesery, a butchery and livestock. The Newt in Somerset has turned orchards, cidermaking and rural history into something closer to a cultural institution. Reschio places guests in a tenth-century Umbrian castle at the centre of a vast biodynamic estate producing grain, olive oil, wine and honey. Heckfield Place, in Hampshire, runs one of hospitality's most rigorous food systems, its biodynamic gardens, orchards

Heckfield Place

and dairy supplying Marle, a restaurant recognised with a Michelin Green Star. And Blackberry Farm, receiving guests in the foothills of Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains since 1976, remains the American benchmark.

Luxury is moving Luxury is moving from possessiontoto from possession participation.

The Newt in Somerset

Babylonstoren

Why this is a new trend

The idea of sleeping on productive land is not new. Italy gave the agriturismo legal recognition in 1985, and the haciendas of the Andes, the estancias of the pampas and the tea planters' bungalows of Sri Lanka's central highlands have received travellers for far longer. For most of that history, however, the farm stay sat at the rustic end of the market:

charming, inexpensive and deliberately simple. What has changed is where the working farm now sits. Over the past fifteen years it has moved from the margins of travel to the top of the market. Babylonstoren, opened in 2010 by Koos Bekker and Karen Roos on a Cape farm dating to the seventeenth century, demonstrated that agriculture could be the organising idea of a world-class hotel rather than its backdrop. The Newt, which the same couple opened in Somerset in 2019, refined the model for Britain, and a wider generation of estates, from Umbria to the Alentejo, has grown up around the same conviction. The growth beneath the luxury tier is measurable. Italy's national statistics office counted 26,360 agritourism businesses and 4.7 million guests in 2024, an increase of 4.3 per cent in a single year, with Tuscany alone accounting for more than a fifth of the national inventory. One market estimate cited by Vogue

puts modern agritourism growth

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La Donaira

at roughly 12 per cent annually, towards a projected value of $14.5 billion by 2029. As the category matures, its definition is tightening. A picturesque country hotel with a decorative kitchen garden no longer qualifies. The properties shaping the movement are built on working systems: multiple productive operations, dedicated growers and livestock teams, processing on the estate and ingredients that can be traced from field to plate. The farm is not an amenity. It is the point.

Why demand is growing

The clearest change is in what guests want to do. Luxury travellers increasingly want participation rather than accommodation alone; harvesting, riding, foraging, cooking and meeting producers create a stronger emotional connection than a conventional resort stay. At La Donaira in Andalusia, nine rooms sit within a 700-hectare biodynamic estate where daily life is organised around some 80 Lusitano horses. At Blackberry Farm, guests follow truffle dogs through the woods. At Hacienda Zuleta, a multigenerational family hacienda in the Ecuadorian Andes, dairy

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farming, artisan cheese and Andean condor conservation remain part of the working day, while Flockhill in New Zealand operates a 36,000-acre sheep and cattle station in the Canterbury high country. Guests' active participation creates memories in a way that a beautiful suite, on its own, cannot. Food provenance, meanwhile, has become a luxury marker in its own right. Guests increasingly value ingredients grown, raised or produced on the estate, particularly when the process is visible and credible, and “our own dairy” now carries more weight than a generic farm-totable claim. Fowlescombe Farm in Devon, with ten suites on 450 acres of rare-breed livestock, has built its full-board restaurant model entirely on the principle, and Heckfield Place composes its menus around what the gardens and dairy provide. The most persuasive kitchens no longer describe their sourcing. They point out of the window. Farm hotels also answer the demand for slower, healthier travel. Space, nature, seasonal food and quieter routines align naturally with the growth of wellness and the appetite for screen-free escape. Sibbjans,

on the Swedish island of Gotland, offers nine rooms in a farmhouse surrounded by sheep, Mangalitsa pigs and greenhouses, while Sterrekopje in Franschhoek presents food, movement, rest and the productive landscape as a single healing system. Neither resembles a conventional resort, and that is precisely part of the appeal. There is also the question of identity. Historic farms, vineyards, livestock and local traditions give each property a character that cannot easily be reproduced by a standardised hotel brand. São Lourenço do Barrocal is a restored farming village in the Alentejo, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves and horses. Ceylon Tea Trails houses guests in historic

tea planters' bungalows, and Gibb's Farm occupies a working coffee farm on the edge of the Ngorongoro highlands. No two estates are alike, because no two landscapes are. None of this has required a sacrifice of comfort. The leading properties combine genuine agriculture with sophisticated architecture, serious restaurants, spas and highly personal service. Reschio pairs its biodynamic estate with one of Europe's most exquisitely finished castle hotels; Flockhill sets ambitious contemporary architecture within its station landscape; Borgo Santo Pietro wraps an organic farm and sheep dairy in Tuscan glamour.

The achievement of the best examples is that neither half of the proposition feels too diminished by the other.

What to expect moving forward Expect regeneration to move from the brochure into the guest experience. The next generation of farm hotels will make soil health, biodiversity, water management and conservation visible, and increasingly measurable, parts of

São Lourenço do Barrocal

Rosewood Calistoga Borgo Santo Pietro

a stay. Sterrekopje and Sibbjans already read as prototypes, and La Donaira has farmed along biodynamic lines for years.

The language of thread counts is quietly being joined by the language of soil. Agriculture will also shape wellness more directly. Medicinal gardens, seasonal nutrition, forest therapies, animal interaction and treatments made from estategrown ingredients are becoming central rather than decorative. Borgo Santo Pietro's Seed to Skin operation, which develops skincare on the estate, points to the direction of travel: the farm as the source not only of dinner, but of the spa menu. The most sophisticated properties are becoming complete estate brands, selling their own wine, olive oil, cheese, skincare, spirits and home products alongside accommodation. The Newt and Babylonstoren already operate this way, their farm shops and

Sibbjans

cellars as considered as their suites, while Los Poblanos, a 25-acre organic lavender farm in New Mexico, extends across

food, gin, skincare and retail. For estates of this kind, the room is one product among many; the strongest draw revenue from accommodation, restaurants, activities, wellness, events and estate-made goods in a single connected system. Finally, the major luxury groups have arrived. Pendry Natirar in New Jersey pairs a 500-acre estate with a ten-acre working farm and cooking school, and Rosewood Calistoga, a Napa Valley resort now in development, will follow, though its agricultural credentials are, for now, adjacent rather than integrated. The 2027 pipeline is striking: Vignamaggio in Tuscany, a historic farming estate of roughly 1,000 acres being transformed by the owners of Babylonstoren and

The Newt; The Pig on the Farm in Warwickshire, with produce gardens, polytunnels and a smokery; La Maviglia in Puglia, 202 hectares of olive oil, wine and organic vegetables; and Laval in Australia's Hunter Valley, with 65 villas on a working commercial vineyard. In Japan, Azuma Farm Koiwai, opened in April 2026 on the historic Koiwai Farm in Iwate by former Aman collaborators, extends the idea into rural regeneration. Growth on this scale will also bring imitation: rural resorts using a small garden as a marketing device without operating a genuine farm. Expect farm-washing to enter the vocabulary of travel as surely as greenwashing did.

The credibility test

The word farm, in other words, risks becoming the next eco: widely used and poorly defined.

The real thing announces itself through evidence rather than styling. It has several productive systems rather than a single photogenic vegetable patch; dedicated growers, gardeners and livestock teams; processing on the estate, whether in a dairy, a bakery or a cellar; ingredients that can be traced to a particular field; and guests who are given meaningful access to all of it. For a century, the grand hotel measured itself by what it could bring in: chefs, marble, flowers flown overnight. The working estate measures itself by what it can produce. The result is not a rustic retreat from luxury, but a broader definition of what luxury can be: less dependent on what a hotel buys, more closely tied to what it grows, raises and makes, and, at its best, capable of sending guests home with a clearer sense of where their pleasure came from.

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A Reimagined Lake Como Grandeur

In Menaggio, Grand Hotel Victoria combines Italian character, contemporary comfort and a privileged position by the water, with Victoria Beach proving one of the best reasons to linger.

Lake Como has no shortage of hotels built around spectacle, but Grand Hotel Victoria in Menaggio makes a slightly different case for itself. Its appeal is less about disappearing into a resort for several days and more about having a comfortable, polished base from which the lake can properly become part of the stay. The water sits close, the town is within walking distance and, just a few minutes away, Victoria Beach gives the hotel another side entirely, with pools, lake access, drinks and long afternoons outside. That balance became clear almost immediately. From the road, the hotel still carries the character expected of Lake Como, with its pale yellow exterior and heritage feel, while inside the mood becomes much more contemporary. The contrast continues through the property, where the historic front of the hotel sits alongside newer spaces towards the rear. For travellers who prefer Lake Como with some sense of its older architectural character, the exterior makes the stronger first impression, but the modern additions make the stay easy and comfortable rather than overly formal. The location is one of the hotel’s strongest advantages, particularly because Grand Hotel Victoria sits in Menaggio with the lake directly in front, yet does not feel cut off from its surroundings. A short walk brings guests into town, where small squares, restaurants, cafés and gelato stops make it easy to leave the hotel without turning every outing into an 68 | RUME | Autumn 2026

MENAGGIO, ITALY

Grand Hotel Victoria CONCEPT & SPA, BY R COLLECTION HOTELS

excursion. Around the waterfront, the area is also particularly pleasant on foot, whether for a slow morning walk or something more active, giving the property a useful sense of independence from the resort itself. For this stay, the room was in the more contemporary section overlooking the pool. It was spacious, with a separate living area and two full-size bathrooms: one with a shower and the other with a bathtub. The TV was built into a wall that doubled as a room divider, so familes can enjoy separate living spaces depending on their activities.

A bottle of Champagne and generous welcome amenities were waiting on arrival, setting an appropriately celebratory tone, although with only one night in Menaggio, the room was never really going to be the centre of the experience. There was simply too much happening on the outside. The first evening quickly proved why. A few minutes from the hotel, Victoria Beach became the setting for dinner, drinks and the most memorable view of the stay. Arriving before the light began to fade meant there was time to settle in with a cold glass of

Ferghettina sparkling wine and watch the colours move across the lake. After several days in the Dolomites, where the hoped-for pink glow on the mountains had never quite appeared, it was unexpectedly here, looking across Lake Como, that the mountains finally caught the evening light and turned pink. It was one of those moments that did not need much embellishment. The weather was warm without being heavy, the lake was calm, music and conversation carried through the evening and the view kept

changing as the sun disappeared behind the surrounding mountains. More than glamour, the feeling was one of appreciation, helped considerably by having a good drink in hand and nowhere else to be. Dinner had a lively edge that evening, with singers and dancers appearing throughout the night, giving Victoria Beach more energy without overwhelming the setting. The food stayed fresh and uncomplicated, beginning with tuna tartare served with avocado cream and crisp crackers, followed by pasta alle vongole with zucchini and a generous finish of olive oil. Both were well handled, but the dish that remained in memory weeks later was the gnocchi with Bolognese sauce and spinach leaves, rich, comforting and easily the standout plate of the whole evening. The following morning brought the experience back to the main hotel, where breakfast was served outdoors close to the lake. The buffet was combined with dishes ordered from the kitchen, including an omelette with prosciutto, followed by the less disciplined but entirely worthwhile addition of Nutella. The cappuccino was good, although not quite at the level expected from a hotel of this standard in Italy, making it one of the few details during the stay that felt as though it could easily be sharpened. Still, breakfast was memorable for the same reason much of Grand Hotel Victoria works so well, because the table, garden and proximity to the water created the mood before the food even

arrived. Sitting outside with the lake only a short distance away made the morning feel unhurried, and it is this connection with the setting that repeatedly became more important than any single design feature inside the hotel. Menaggio also works particularly well for travellers who actually want to explore Lake Como rather than simply look at it from a terrace. During the day, the stay extended beyond the hotel with a trip across to the quaint and charming Bellagio, taking the car onto the nearby ferry connection and seeing another side of the lake before returning. With Lake Como spread across such a large area, choosing where to stay changes the rhythm of the trip considerably, and this part of the lake lends itself well to combining time by the water with excursions elsewhere. It was possible to walk around Menaggio in the morning, cross the lake later in the day and still return without the excursion feeling like an operation in itself. This is not necessarily a hotel that demands guests remain inside its world from morning until night, and that is actually part of its appeal. After checking out, there was still a final chapter waiting back at Victoria Beach, where the hotel had arranged sunbeds for the afternoon. The beach club is close enough to walk, although a buggy can also take guests across, and once there the pace changes immediately. There are two large pool areas, with spaces that work for adults and families, as well as the opportunity to get directly into the lake for a swim. That makes for a different experience entirely, because Lake Como becomes somewhere to swim and spend the afternoon rather than simply scenery

to admire from a hotel balcony. The afternoon was deliberately simple: swimming, fresh fruit and strawberries, a few more glasses of Champagne and enough time on a sunbed to make leaving feel premature. As the light began to soften, the mountains turned pink again across the lake, bringing the stay back to exactly where it had begun the evening before. Grand Hotel Victoria is not trying to be the most theatrical hotel on Lake Como, and travellers looking for the destination at its most opulent and conspicuous will find other addresses that lean further into that side of the lake. Its strength is different, combining Italian character with contemporary comfort, a particularly convenient location in Menaggio and a beach club that allows guests to spend meaningful time beside, and in, the water. It would suit couples just as comfortably as families, but perhaps its best fit is for travellers who want their hotel to support a Lake Como trip rather than

become the entire trip. There is enough here to slow down, eat well, swim and spend a long afternoon beside the lake, while Menaggio and the surrounding connections make it easy to go elsewhere when curiosity starts to take over. The dining offering within the main hotel itself could feel broader for anyone planning to remain on property for several days, yet the restaurants within walking distance and the experience at Victoria Beach make that less of a limitation than it might initially seem. For a first stay on Lake Como, Grand Hotel Victoria got the balance right. The room was comfortable, the setting was strong and the hotel made moving between Menaggio, Victoria Beach and the rest of the lake feel easy, but the memories that lasted were much less complicated: breakfast in the garden, a plate of gnocchi, a cold glass of sparkling wine and those mountains turning pink across the water. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 69

Art of the HOTEL Lobby The

Aman Venice

Capella Bangkok

The lobby has long been treated as the room where a stay begins and ends. At the hotels giving it most thought, it has become the place the property actually lives, occupied from morning until late. From atriums and tea rooms to art salons and open kitchens, we consider the first room of the hotel as its social centre. The useful test of a hotel lobby has little to do with arrival. It is what the room looks like at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, when nobody is checking in and nobody is leaving. Some lobbies are busy at that hour, with residents reading, locals meeting and a bar quietly working. Others are empty, staffed and immaculate, waiting for the next taxi. At Capella Bangkok the answer to that test is called the Living Room. Separate from the hotel’s public restaurants and bars, it is reserved for resident guests and hosts cultural activities, tastings and the daily Cin Cin drinks ritual. Capella culturists use the space to introduce guests to the city and arrange experiences around it. Check-in may happen there, but it is the least important of the room’s functions. A conventional lobby is most relevant during the first and final 20 minutes of a stay. The Living Room stays busy in between, which makes it neither a reception area nor a club lounge. It gives guests a recognisable centre and a standing appointment for socialising. That is one answer to a question the industry is currently reopening. Reception may now be

appointments, correspondence and the observation of society, and people used them without staying overnight. Architecture communicated the hotel’s importance, but the crowd passing through supplied the atmosphere. One room from that period never stopped doing the job. The Lobby at The Peninsula Hong Kong has served afternoon tea since the hotel opened in 1928, beneath colonnades and a double-height ceiling, with live music from the balcony above. It seats roughly 200 people, takes no reservations at all, and its long-standing afternoon tea tradition keeps the room in constant use as a social venue rather than a waiting area. The queue outside is the point. People who are not staying at the hotel wait in line for the privilege of sitting in its lobby, and they pay for the privilege once seated. Few properties demonstrate the commercial value of a public room so plainly, and fewer still have been doing it for nearly a century without interruption. The architectural emphasis became more

Guest corridors overlooked a soaring central void while glass elevators travelled visibly through the building. Atriums, fountains and monumental interiors became symbols of ambition through the 1970s and 1980s. Those rooms were destinations rather than thoroughfares. Scale and movement gave people a reason to sit in them, and the lobby carried much of the hotel’s commercial weight, with cafés, bars and shops arranged around the central space. The building was presented almost as a self-contained city, and the city used it accordingly. In the Gulf, that instinct met an older one. The majlis, the room in which a household greets and seats its visitors, established the social centre near the entrance long before any atrium was built, and it still shapes how the region’s hotels use their ground floors. Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental, Abu

Dhabi works at the scale of the atrium and the logic of the majlis at once. Its cafe Episodes sits at the heart of the palace lobby, serving teas, pastries and the gold-flaked cappuccino that has become a reason to visit in itself. Abu Dhabi treats the building as a public monument, and the lobby is where that treatment happens.

Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental, Abu Dhabi

The question is no longer how a lobby greets you. It is whether you come back to it. positioned at a small table, concealed inside a library or handled in the guest’s room. The traditional functions of arrival are increasingly distributed across several spaces, while the lobby itself is asked to do the harder work of holding the hotel’s social life through the day. The ambition is not new. The great hotels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treated their public rooms as extensions of the city. Their lobbies hosted

pronounced during the second half of the twentieth century. The atrium hotel arrived in 1967, when the architect John Portman built a vast internal volume at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and produced a new type of hotel spectacle.

The Peninsula Hong Kong

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By the late 1980s a third model was emerging. Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, working with Philippe Starck, transformed Royalton New York into a hotel whose lobby was built as a social scene. Rather than relying on scale, it used lighting, furniture, music and the composition of the crowd. Schrager coined the term “lobby socialising” for the result, with hotel guests and New Yorkers occupying the same room. Across the 1990s and early 2000s, boutique and lifestyle hotels treated the lobby as bar, meeting room and expression of brand identity. The reception counter did not disappear, but it was joined by DJs, statement furniture, darker lighting and a more deliberate relationship with the street outside. As the idea entered the mainstream it also became easy to reproduce. A lobby could look sociable without being comfortable, and residential furniture could be arranged without making a room feel residential. Bookshelves, communal tables, curated objects and carefully chosen music eventually became as familiar as the polished marble they had been brought in to replace. Schrager’s own version of the idea is now 31 floors above Tokyo. The lobby of The Tokyo Edition, Toranomon occupies the 31st floor of the Tokyo World Gate tower, planted with more than 500 plants and open to the Tokyo Tower skyline. The room has been designed for occupation rather than passage, and the seating plan says so plainly. The Lobby Bar seats 75, with 23 places at the bar, 26 on couches and 26 at communal working tables. It runs from morning coffee through afternoon tea to evening cocktails,

and it draws Tokyo residents as readily as guests. Four decades and a change of continent have left the original argument largely intact. A smaller group of hotels has taken the public room somewhere else entirely, giving it a cultural programme rather than a social one. The distinction is practical. A bar gives people a reason to arrive in the evening, while a gallery or a bookshop gives them

Tokyo Edition Toranomon

a reason to arrive at eleven in the morning and stay. Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris makes that case most completely. Its public rooms hold an art gallery, an art bookshop, a 99-seat cinema and a collection of more than 300 works, with an art concierge on hand to arrange access to exhibitions and studios across the city. The bookshop, the first of its kind in a Parisian palace hotel, sells to Parisians looking for gifts. That last detail is the measure of the room. A hotel whose ground floor works as a bookshop and gallery has given people a reason to walk in , and given its own guests a reason to stay downstairs. What results is a cultural venue with a hotel attached rather than the other way around.

Rosewood São Paulo applies similar

thinking on a larger scale. Occupying a former maternity hospital within the Cidade Matarazzo complex, its public rooms hold a permanent collection of more than 450 works commissioned from 57 Brazilian artists and artisans, which makes the ground floor a destination for São Paulo as much as for guests. Those rooms are also programmed. Rabo di Galo, the hotel’s jazz bar, has live music nightly beneath a hand-drawn ceiling, while Le Jardin extends from the lobby into the gardens as a glasshouse. Between them the property has spread its social life across several public rooms rather than concentrating it at a desk. Elsewhere the lobby has been dissolved into

Le Royal Monceau

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Rosewood São Paulo

Passalacqua

Ett Hem

the building rather than reprogrammed. The reference point is not the hotel at all but the private house, where the rooms people gather in were never designed to process anybody’s arrival. Nothing needs to be added to make such a room sociable, because sitting in it was always the purpose. Ett Hem in Stockholm takes that route furthest. Its name translates as “a home”, and the property occupies three private houses rather than a conventional hotel building. Guests move between kitchens, sitting rooms, a library and a garden, surrounded by art and objects chosen to feel collected rather than installed. The house performs the work usually assigned to a lobby. In Italy, Passalacqua and Casa Maria Luigia offer two versions of the same model. Passalacqua’s 24 rooms are arranged across a historic Lake Como estate where salons, terraces, gardens and kitchens create multiple places for the hotel’s life to unfold. The experience draws on villeggiatura, the Italian tradition of unhurried occupation of a villa and its landscape.

No single room carries the full identity of the property. Arrival introduces guests to the estate, but its character emerges gradually, over breakfast in the garden, a drink in one of the salons or an afternoon beside the lake. The entrance is not the point. The hours spent in the rooms beyond it are. Casa Maria Luigia, the country house created by Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore outside Modena, is shaped more directly by food. Shared tables, contemporary art, an open kitchen and readily available refreshments give its communal rooms a rhythm of their own. Welcome comes from making the house usable, not from removing every formality. None of this requires abandoning ceremony, and Aman Venice is the clearest demonstration. Guests arriving by private boat enter Palazzo Papadopoli from the Grand Canal, but the historic staircase, salons and garden beyond are the rooms that hold the stay. The arrival is a route into them rather than the event in itself. These properties share no aesthetic. Passalacqua is richly layered while Ett Hem feels domestic and collected. Emirates Palace is monumental and Rosewood São Paulo is a working art collection. What they align on is a reduced emphasis on reception and a room, or several, that people choose to sit in when they have no transaction to complete. None of it is guaranteed to work. Programmed

sociability can feel scheduled, and a daily ritual becomes an obligation once guests sense they are expected to attend. Plenty of residential lobbies sit empty through the afternoon because nobody has been given a reason to use them, and softer furniture alone does not supply one. The traditional lobby is not obsolete either. A grand urban hotel benefits from a clearly defined room able to handle hundreds of arrivals, meetings and visitors at once, and historic lobbies remain among the most animated public spaces in their cities. A concealed reception becomes an inconvenience when service is not attentive enough to replace it. The most convincing examples hold both. They keep operational clarity while making the public rooms worth occupying, and they accept that guests want privacy and participation at different hours of the same day. Lively communal spaces work better when quieter corners sit alongside them. The evolution of the hotel lobby has moved between architecture and social life, spectacle and intimacy, public display and private comfort. Today’s most considered hotels borrow from each. The result is not the end of the lobby but a broader test of it, measured less by the impression it makes on arrival than by how full of life it is at four in the afternoon. Autumn 2026 | RUME | 73

A beach stay woven into the city

andarin Oriental Jumeira, Dubai is the kind of hotel that many people living in the city already know before they ever stay there. Since opening in 2019 as Mandarin Oriental’s first property in the Middle East, its A beach resort shaped as much by the rhythm of Dubai as by the restaurants, beach club and light-filled lobby sea beyond its doors. have become part of Two nights at Mandarin Oriental Jumeira, Dubai reveal Dubai life in their own a polished beachfront resort where thoughtful room right. The address sits details, serious dining and one of the city’s strongest directly on Jumeirah locations make it remarkably easy to settle in. Beach in Jumeirah 1, yet Downtown Dubai remains close enough that the hotel never feels detached from the city beyond the shoreline. That familiarity is part of the reason for wanting to stay. here had already been dinners at Tasca, 74 | RUME | Autumn 2026

meetings over coffee in Noor Lounge and enough visits over the years for us to know the public spaces well, but staying here revealed how comfortably the property works once the day slows down. With 256 rooms and suites, it is not a small hotel, although it rarely feels sprawling either. The stay began early, before the room was ready, with lunch at The Bay, the hotel’s relaxed beachside brasserie and the same restaurant that handles breakfast each morning. The setting makes sense for an arrival lunch: light, easy, close to the pools and the sea, and

informal enough to settle in without turning the first meal into an occasion. The meal started with tuna tartare and beef carpaccio, and the carpaccio was the dish that immediately justified ordering more than one starter. The beef was sliced almost impossibly thin, then finished with Parmesan, dried mushroom and a truffle element that made it rich without losing the delicacy of the meat underneath. A vongole pasta and steak with fries followed, both well cooked and enjoyable, although neither tried to compete with the first plate. With a couple of glasses of wine and the sea

ready far easier than it sounds on paper and is still surprisingly rare in hotels at this level. Later that night, a low automatic light came on with movement when someone got out of bed, offering just enough illumination to find the bathroom without switching on the room lights. Neither feature is dramatic, but both belong to the category of details guests notice precisely because they remove small annoyances. A Mandarin Oriental fan was also waiting in the room, a simple welcome that connected the stay back to the wider brand without making the gifting experience feel overly branded. The first evening stayed within the hotel and moved to Netsu by Ross Shonhan, the Japanese steakhouse built around the Warayaki technique of cooking over intense rice-straw fire. Netsu has been part of Mandarin Oriental Jumeira since the hotel opened, but it continues to feel lively rather than established in the sleepy sense, and the

restaurant was considerably busier than expected for an evening during Dubai’s notably quieter season. The bar has recently shifted position within the restaurant, and the new setup feels more integrated into the evening. A gin basil was followed by the Yugen, a signature combining rum, passion fruit, citrus and bubbles, finished with a playful origami detail on top. Dinner moved through Wagyu gyoza, sweet miso eggplant, salmon maki and spicy tuna, and the eggplant was one of those plates that quietly changes the way a familiar ingredient is perceived. Soft, savoury and deeply glazed, it made a stronger impression than several more expensive dishes on the table. The main course brought Australian Wagyu tenderloin, rice and broccolini, but the order to remember is the Wagyu and truffle sando, made with Japanese milk bread and truffle butter. The beef arrived properly pink

The lobby is dominated by 14 sculptural trees, each studded with 900 lights, creating a glowing canopy that leads the eye toward the sea.

only a few steps away, it was exactly the sort of lunch that works before a Dubai staycation properly begins. We stayed in a Deluxe Sea View Room, a 58-square-metre category with floor-to-ceiling windows, a private balcony and broad views across the Arabian Gulf. Mandarin Oriental describes the interiors as contemporary, although the room has enough texture to keep it from feeling anonymous, with warm timber, marble, lacquered details and flashes of green that echo the hotel’s Silk Road references. The bathroom and dressing areas unfold around the entrance

before the room opens toward the balcony and sea beyond. The marble bathroom is generous and visually connected to the bedroom, while the sleeping area has enough space for a proper sitting area. The bed in this particular room was exceptionally wide, even by luxury hotel standards, and almost too large for two people who actually want to feel that they are sharing the same bed. The more memorable room details were smaller and far more practical. Inside the walk-in shower, a self-heating mirror remained clear even after a long hot shower, which makes getting Autumn 2026 | RUME | 75

Tasca by José Avillez

through the centre, the bread crisp at the edges, and the whole thing hit exactly the point where richness still feels satisfying rather than excessive. The sommelier gave the dinner another layer, with a conversation about volcanic wines moving naturally toward Etna and then into other bottles worth considering without becoming a lecture or an upsell. That sort of service matters in a restaurant this busy because it makes a full room feel personal, and it was one of the better examples during the stay of Mandarin Oriental’s polish showing up through people rather than presentation. Breakfast at The Bay is extensive, with fruit, pastries, cold dishes and plenty cooked to order. Passion fruit and coconut yoghurt made an easy start before eggs, while the shakshuka on the following morning was the dish worth returning for, served with a large, thin round of freshly baked Arabic bread that arrived warm enough to tear straight away. The one disappointment was the hummus, which was dry and difficult to excuse in a Middle Eastern hotel breakfast, especially when the Arabic bread beside it was so good. It was a small miss within a strong spread, but also the sort of detail that matters

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because the simplest regional staples often reveal more about a kitchen than the elaborate options around them. The fitness facilities are unusually serious for a resort hotel. The gym is large, bright and comprehensively equipped, with enough strength and cardio equipment that a proper training session does not require improvisation. That same practical approach carries outside, where several pools stretch through the landscaped gardens and one long pool works particularly well for laps. Early in the morning, before most guests claim their loungers, it becomes one of the most enjoyable parts of the property, with palm trees on either side and the Arabian Gulf visible beyond the beach. Swimming there before breakfast gave the stay a natural rhythm. Later in the day the pool areas become busier, but an early start leaves enough quiet to swim properly, while the beach offers a slower alternative once the exercise is done. When the Gulf is warm, the water can feel almost bath-like, yet there is still something restorative about standing in it with the horizon open in front. On our second night, the hotel arranged a private transfer to its newly opened Downtown

property for dinner at Yù & Mì. The roughly 10-minute drive reinforces one of Mandarin Oriental Jumeira’s strongest qualities. It is unquestionably a beach hotel, but it remains woven into the city closely enough that dinner Downtown never feels like an expedition. Yù & Mì sits on the 36th floor of Mandarin Oriental Downtown and takes its inspiration from 1960s Hong Kong, with Cantonese and Sichuan cooking at the centre of the menu. The mood is darker than Jumeira, with low lighting and jade-toned details, while the food stood out through a crisp honey soy eggplant, delicate shrimp and chicken siew mai and a Wagyu beef black pepper puff whose fine layers broke apart almost as soon as the chopsticks touched them. For the main course, the hoisinglazed smoked Chilean sea bass had the most personality, carrying enough smoke and sweetness to feel indulgent without overwhelming the fish, which remained soft and flaky beneath the glaze. Wok-fried Hong Kong noodles in superior soy sauce were much simpler and just as compelling, the kind of

Netsu

Yù & Mì

side dish that disappears faster than expected, while Wagyu beef fried rice arrived in a small pot with the grains loose and separate rather than sticky. Dessert returned to familiar territory with a chocolate fondant and vanilla ice cream. The fondant was cooked exactly as it should be, holding long enough for the spoon to break the centre before the warm chocolate ran out, and a few gold leaves gave it the sort of restrained flourish Dubai rarely resists. The vanilla ice cream was the weaker half of the pairing, tasting more ordinary than the fondant deserved, which stopped an otherwise excellent dessert from being quite complete. A car was waiting when dinner finished, and the transfer back made the detour feel effortless rather than like a night away from the hotel. The final morning brought another swim, breakfast and time on the beach before a 2pm check-out, but the stay could not properly end without Noor Lounge. Mandarin Oriental calls it “The Living Room of Dubai”, and the description feels earned because local guests come for coffee, afternoon tea, meetings

and long conversations as naturally as hotel guests do. The room is dominated by 14 sculptural trees that rise through the lobby, each studded with 900 lights, creating a glowing canopy that leads the eye toward the sea. The scale is impressive, but the reason Noor works is that the architecture does not stop it feeling usable. Sofas and tables sit comfortably beneath the installation, the floor-to-ceiling glass brings daylight through the room, and the coffee and pastry selection is strong enough that people have a reason to stay after the photographs are taken. Ending the stay there changed departure from a formal checkout into something more relaxed, with a final coffee beneath the trees feeling less like waiting to leave and more like spending another hour in a room the city already treats as its own. Mandarin Oriental Jumeira does not need a single spectacular trick to justify itself. Its strength comes from how consistently the pieces fit together: a beachfront setting that remains genuinely connected to the city, a room large enough to settle into, a gym that takes exercise seriously, pools that can be used rather than merely admired, and restaurants that are destinations

even for people who are not staying at the hotel. There are details that could be sharper, from the dry hummus at breakfast to vanilla ice cream that did not match the fondant, and the oversized bed in this particular room will divide opinion. None changes the overall impression because the stay is held together by thoughtfulness. The anti-fog mirror, the low light at night, the sommelier discussing Etna in a packed restaurant and the car waiting after dinner are small decisions, but together they make the hotel easy to inhabit. For first-time visitors to Dubai, the location is one of the clearest reasons to choose it, particularly for anyone who wants access to the beach without giving up the restaurants, galleries, shopping and business life of central Dubai. For residents, it works differently, offering enough separation to feel like a proper break while keeping the city reassuringly close. After two nights, Mandarin Oriental Jumeira felt exactly as a mature city resort should: polished without becoming stiff, elegant without becoming precious, and familiar in a way that makes returning seem less like repeating a stay and more like resuming one.

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UXURY

The luxurious decision, when something cannot be done properly, may be not to offer it at all.

The two are often treated as synonyms, here is a persistent habit in travel yet experienced of allowing price to do the work travellers know of definition. A suite reaches a certain nightly rate, a restaurant occupies a the distinction celebrated address, a resort arrives with an instinctively. Price ambitious architect and enough marble to may establish an photograph beautifully, and the word luxury almost automatically. The association expectation, but luxury follows is understandable, because genuine luxury is revealed in how is rarely cheap to produce, but the logic also too easily in reverse. Something can be completely a place works expensive because of its location, its scarcity, delivers on the promise its branding or simply because the market will the rate, while still falling short of the it has chosen to make. bear experience that the word luxury is supposed

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to describe. For a well-travelled guest, the difference usually reveals itself in details that would appear almost trivial on a development budget. A hotel may have spent extraordinary sums on stone, art and lighting, yet leave guests waiting at reception for twenty

minutes. A bathroom may be lined in marble while the shower pressure is underwhelming. Breakfast may be presented with all the visual codes of a five-star property, but the coffee is ordinary, the fruit is tired and the simplest regional dish has been produced without much care. None of these failures is catastrophic on its own, nor does luxury require perfection, but when enough of them begin to accumulate they expose something more fundamental: the price has been considered more carefully than the guest's experience. This is where luxury becomes less about expenditure and more about discipline. The best properties are not necessarily those that offer the greatest number of things, but those that have decided what they stand for and then refuse to dilute it. If coffee is served, it should be very good coffee. If strawberries are

vs.

on the breakfast table, they should be there because they are worth eating, not because a buffet is expected to contain strawberries. The luxurious decision, when something cannot be done properly, may be not to offer it at all. Luxury has never required sameness. A resort built around seclusion should be judged differently from a city hotel whose energy comes from busy restaurants, a crowded bar and a lobby that functions as part of the social life of the destination. Quiet is not inherently more luxurious than atmosphere, just as a private villa is not inherently more luxurious than a grand hotel. What matters is whether the proposition has been understood with enough clarity that every part of the experience supports it. A property promising privacy should make privacy feel effortless; one built around gastronomy should not allow food and beverage to become secondary; a wellness retreat cannot treat the spa as an amenity attached to a room inventory. In that sense, luxury is not a checklist of expensive ingredients but the coherence between intention and delivery. It appears when the room temperature is right on arrival, when the curtains actually achieve darkness, when the lighting has been considered at midnight as carefully as it was at sunset, and when a member of staff can explain what is being served rather than repeat a description learned that morning. It is present in how quickly luggage appears, whether a request needs to be made once or three times, and whether the hotel protects a guest’s time as seriously as it protects its design language.

Luxury is not a checklist of expensive ingredients but the coherence between intention and delivery. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this discipline is not physical at all, but operational. The best luxury hotels give their teams enough knowledge and authority to make decisions without turning every request into a procedure. A guest should not feel the internal hierarchy of a property simply because something out of the ordinary has been asked. When service is genuinely considered, the organisation disappears behind it: the concierge can solve, the restaurant can adapt, housekeeping can notice and respond. That ease is difficult to build because it depends on recruitment, training, retention and trust, yet it rarely appears on a specification sheet. It is one of the strongest signs that luxury is embedded rather than staged. These are not the elements most likely to dominate a campaign, but sophisticated travellers tend to notice them because spectacle becomes less persuasive with repetition. After enough beautiful hotels, another double-height lobby, infinity pool or dramatic arrival sequence can still be impressive without necessarily feeling luxurious. Attention begins to move

elsewhere, toward the quality of the sleep, the intelligence of the service, the confidence of the kitchen, the ease of moving through the property and the sense that decisions have been made by people who understand how the place is actually used. The same principle can be seen in restaurants. An expensive Japanese restaurant can source rare ingredients, commission an extraordinary room and build a wine list with impressive names, yet luxury only emerges when those components make sense together. The fish needs to be selected because it is at its best, the chef needs the skill to handle it properly, the team needs enough knowledge to guide the guest without performing expertise, and the pacing needs to feel natural rather than rehearsed. The value is not

EXPENSIVE Cost can explain a rate; it simply cannot authenticate the experience.

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created by how many premium elements have been assembled, but by the depth with which each one has been considered. This is also why a less expensive property can, at times, feel more luxurious than one charging twice the rate. A smaller hotel may have fewer facilities and less architectural theatre, but if the welcome is intuitive, the food is consistently good, the room works beautifully and the service understands when to appear and when to disappear, the guest experiences something that money alone does not guarantee: care expressed through consistency. The comparison is not an argument against high prices. Exceptional staffing, low room density, remote locations, high-quality ingredients, maintenance, craft and privacy all carry real costs, and many of the world’s finest hotels are expensive for very good reasons. Cost can explain a rate; it simply cannot authenticate the experience. There is another component that becomes increasingly important at the highest end of travel: selectivity. Luxury has always carried some relationship with access, but access is not only about keeping people out. It is

Expensive is a commercial fact; luxury is a standard of delivery.

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When enough small compromises accumulate, they expose something more fundamental about protecting the conditions that allow the

experience to remain exceptional. A hotel that promises stillness cannot continue adding inventory until the stillness disappears. A restaurant that depends on extraordinary produce cannot expand indefinitely without changing what arrives on the plate. A resort built around personal service eventually reaches a point where more guests require either more people, more infrastructure or a compromise in delivery. Expensive products can be scaled through marketing; luxury is often constrained precisely because its standards are difficult to scale. For the guest, this distinction changes the meaning of value. Value at the luxury end of the market has very little to do with finding the lowest possible rate, and everything to do with whether the rate is supported by the experience. A five-thousand-dollar room can represent excellent value if the property delivers something rare, deeply considered and difficult to reproduce, while a room at half that price can feel expensive when the experience is generic. The question is not whether something costs a lot, but whether the cost has bought access to greater thought, better execution and a standard that remains intact when the obvious performance of luxury is stripped away. That last point is perhaps the most revealing, because the real test rarely happens at the moment of arrival. It happens the following morning, when the light is less flattering and the theatre has receded. It happens when

breakfast is busy, when the hotel is full, when a transfer changes at short notice or when a guest asks for something outside the script. Luxury is most convincing when it survives operational pressure, because that is when systems, training and judgement become more important than design. The industry has become exceptionally good at signalling expense. Rates are higher, suites are larger, brand collaborations are more elaborate and the vocabulary of exclusivity has found its way into almost every corner of

hospitality. Yet the more widely those signals are used, the less useful they become as evidence of luxury. The guest who knows the difference is no longer persuaded by the label alone, because luxury is ultimately felt as the cumulative result of hundreds of decisions, many of which will never be visible enough to market. Perhaps this is why the clearest distinction between luxury and expensive is also the simplest. Expensive is a commercial fact; luxury is a standard of delivery. One can be created by demand, positioning and scarcity, while the other has to be earned repeatedly, through the quality of what is offered and the discipline to remove what cannot meet the standard. When the two align, the price becomes almost secondary to the sense that everything belongs. When they do not, no amount of marble can close the gap.

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