Poland Hotels Booking

Yes, why not a Hotel of Modern Art. To be more exact, perhaps a hotel of modern sculpture: this resort outside Guilin, in China’s south central Guangxi province, is surrounded by a thousand and a half acres of outdoor sculpture, by a wide-ranging array of international artists. It’s the folly (in the respectful old English manor-house architectural-folly sense) of a Taiwanese cemetery developer, and it’s a self-aware folly — the name of the place, Yuzi Paradise, translates roughly as “fool’s paradise,” and the sculpture garden just happens to have opened on April Fool’s Day a few years back.

You’d expect that a folly would be above all enjoyable for its visitors, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Amid all this visual stimulation is a smart and comfortable boutique hotel, 49 bedrooms’ worth of crisp modernist design, all smooth surfaces and luxe fittings. All the resort-hotel basics are covered as well, from pool and spa to fancy restaurant. And there’s plenty of outdoor activity beyond the expansive sculpture gardens — play some golf, hire a guide for some sightseeing, go for a raft trip down the Li river, or take a hike or a bicycle tour of the scenic Guangxi countryside.

Why Greensboro, North Carolina? Because that’s where the Proximity Hotel is — and a hotel like this deserves to get noticed no matter where in the world it’s located. It’s contemporary in design, it’s independently owned, it’s state-of-the-art in function, and it’s manageably small — all qualities we admire. But the central point to be made about the Proximity is that it’s got a genuine shot at being the greenest hotel in North America.

If there’s an environmentalist heaven, then this is how you get in. The Proximity is built with recycled materials, heated by solar power, cooled geothermally. Efficient lighting conserves energy, efficient plumbing conserves water, even the elevators return energy to the system, re-charging during descent in the same way a hybrid automobile charges its battery while braking.

But that’s just half the concept. The other half is that you’d never know about any of these green measures without setting out to look for them — they never compromise the guest’s experience. Rooms are as spacious, well-lit and comfortable as those in conventional luxury hotels, and the emphasis on sustainable local food sourcing isn’t exactly rough on the palate either. If you’re trying to save the world, one hotel visit at a time, then this is a great place to start — but even the most decadent carbon-guzzler would have a hard time finding fault with the Proximity’s comforts.

The resort town of Le Touquet, on the coast of Normandy, has a reputation as a cosmopolitan, semi-urban beach resort, frequented mostly by city types on weekend trips from London or Paris. A sun-bleached cottage on the sand just wouldn’t look right in such a style-conscious town. Instead you’ve got the Pol Hotel, a Twenties Flemish-style red brick building, just across the street from the famous Covered Market — here you’re less than a quarter-mile from the beach, but you’re just as close to the shops, boutiques and bars along the Rue Saint-Jean.

In some seaside resorts the mania for historic preservation too often takes hold, with owners turning hotels into museum exhibits. Not so here; the Pol is fresh off a thorough makeover courtesy of Flamant, the Belgian home interiors company. As such it’s contemporary in style, muted in color, and expertly coördinated — any more so and the Pol might start looking like a furniture showroom. Bathrooms are just as carefully planned, with Dornbracht taps, Alape basins and Molton Brown bath products. With no restaurant, the Pol is more discreet hideaway than full-service resort hotel; it’s a blessing in disguise, though, forcing guests out into the town to sample Le Touquet’s culinary scene.

Finally the Excelsior’s long-overdue refurbishment is complete. Frankly it’s a hit-or-miss proposition when one of the world’s great grand hotels goes under the renovation knife. Will it wake up renewed, refreshed, but with personality intact? Or will it find all its character bleached out, replaced by yards of beige carpet and off-the-shelf furnishings?

In this case it’s all just cleaner and brighter, but still with personality to spare. Some rooms keep to the ultra-traditional Empire style, swaddled in rich fabrics and packed with ornate woodwork and classic furnishings. Even the “modernized” rooms are pretty far from corporate-contemporary, and all stick to the same genre of white-glove luxury that’s made the Excelsior a perennial favorite for VIPs and other five-star types. And the facilities befit the Excelsior’s stature as well: a fine dining restaurant, an upscale cocktail bar, a full-service spa, and even the elusive city-center hotel pool.

All this, of course, comes at a price. Rome’s not a cheap city for a hotel stay, and an experience like this is priced accordingly. For the ultimate in excess, book the Villa La Cupola, the split-level corner suite which claims to be Europe’s largest — it’s almost not even an overstatement to call it a villa.

Hotel Mayet will be closed December 20-27, 2007.

At this late date the mere fact of a contemporary-style hotel in Paris may not be enough to raise eyebrows. But add to that the fact that Hotel Mayet manages to come in at a starting rate of under €120 per night, and you’ve got yourself a story.

In this case we’re not talking about the kind of haute-luxury minimalism that fills the pages of the interior design magazines. The Mayet is perhaps brighter, more cheerful, more colorful and eclectic than what we’re used to seeing; there are options around Paris if you’d like to stay somewhere more sober and grown-up, and pay twice as much while you’re at it.

From the lobby, bedecked with graffiti by a local Parisian artist, you know what you’re in for. The rooms continue on in the same vein, not the biggest rooms in the city, but livened considerably by the simple shapes and vibrant colors. Services are on the light side, as you’d expect for the price, but the basics are accounted for. Breakfast is included, wi-fi is free, and most anything else you’d need is practically right at your doorstep — the Mayet’s location, near the Boulevard Montparnasse, places the best of Paris at your feet.

Whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage is somewhat in the eye of the guest, but one thing’s for sure: the most notable feature of Thompson Hotels’ new Gild Hall is its location. Just a few hundred yards from Wall Street, this is deep in the heart of the financial district, a place that not too many years ago used to turn into a ghost town by about seven in the evening.

It turns out bankers and brokers have plenty of taste. Forget about tired Nineties minimalism — this place is full of character, right down to the split-level library and champagne bar, complete with fully-functioning books (pages and all) and clubby leather sofas. This, one imagines, is where the masters of the financial universe come to unwind after the closing bell.

There’s a whiff of nostalgia upstairs as well, the typically stylish guest rooms done up in dark masculine colors, with leather headboards behind the beds. Gild Hall carefully walks the line between fashionable boutique and out-and-out luxury hotel, a line you may have noticed all the Thompson hotels stick close to. Another reward for those who aren’t shy about exploring the lowest of Lower Manhattan is the Libertine, the new restaurant by Todd English, designed in a Seventies tavern style — again, as far from glossy stockbroker minimalism as it gets.

This one’s not for the tourists — Hotel Kube makes its home in an ill-traveled and unphotogenic corner of the 18th arrondissement, far from the postcard images of Paris’s traditional must-see sights. For the crowd of hipsters and design junkies that haunts these halls, however, the Kube is a sight unto itself; within this listed 19th-century building is a hotel that’s as cutting-edge as they come, a geometric fantasy from the same mind that conceived the fashion-forward Murano Urban Resort.

The first clue that there’s anything going on behind that classic facade is the glass cube out in the courtyard that’s home to the reception desk. The lobby lounge is a dark and enveloping space, surprisingly unpretentious, given the scene — striped-fur sofas strewn with pink stuffed dolls keep things from getting too serious and masculine. Up on the mezzanine, flanked by transparent bubble chairs, is the ice bar, a Scandinavian-style near-zero meat locker of a room serving chilled vodka to parka-wearing guests in metabolically-mandated half-hour shifts.

All this artifice might have you holding your breath as you approach your room, but there’s nothing to fear — the bedrooms are neither arch nor jokey, but simply well-designed, in a palette of near-whites livened by sparing splashes of color. A soft light seems to permeate, coming from everywhere (including under the platform bed) and the bathrooms particularly glow, set off from the bedrooms behind walls of glass bricks (cubic in shape, if you’re sensing some kind of theme).

Maybe the design boutique revolution was slow in coming to Paris, but nobody ever thought the city lacked for style — so while elsewhere in the world the concept seems to have lost a bit of its impact, places like the Kube are proof that there’s still plenty of fun to be had.

Far from the grim stone fortress conjured by the name, Gregans Castle turns out to be something quite a bit more refined and urbane: not a castle at all, it’s a 250-year-old manor house, lovingly maintained, thoroughly renovated, and reopened as a charming and elegant country house hotel, the sort of place that’s far too high-class to boast about the famous names in the guest book.

But they’re there, if you look, and it’s easy to see why — this place is a classic, surrounded by gardens and paths, overlooking Galway Bay and the unique rocky landscape of the Burren. The house itself comprises some 21 bedrooms, as well as seemingly endless drawing rooms, lounges, libraries. The guest rooms are all different, ranging widely in size, from petite bedrooms to sprawling suites, and more subtly in style, from the absolutely traditional oldest rooms to the faintly contemporary newer suites.

Hotel amenities stick to the essentials; this is a classic country house hotel, not an all-inclusive resort. The dining room serves French food, made from local and regional ingredients, including organic Burren beef and lamb, and local Atlantic seafood. There’s plenty to see in the surrounding rugged and rocky countryside, and even options for golfers, but in the evenings, guests may find themselves forced to socialize in the Corkscrew Bar or the drawing room — the sort of old-fashioned country life we’ve all at least seen at the movies, if not in our daily lives.