Matt Hranek
Editor's Letter: For All the Hotels We Love
by Pilar Guzmán
Editor in Chief Pilar Guzmán gives an introduction to the 2014 Hot List and the rest of the May issue.
We do a lot of lists in this magazine. Some are exhaustive, drawing on a survey of thousands of readers. Others are purely subjective. The Hot List, which covers 33 of our favorite new properties selected from a pool roughly 15 times that number, falls into the latter category and, not for nothing, is a year in the making. Though the methodology and standards are no less rigorous—as editors John Wogan and Hanya Yanagihara can attest—the criteria are often much more ephemeral.
Beyond the requisite consideration of bed linens, uninterrupted views, and the nuances of hyper-attentive (yet nearly invisible) service, the Hot List sparks conversations around our offices that sound more philosophical than practical. Answers to questions like how to define luxury now—a critical topic in determining relative "hotness"—deal not only with the quality of craftsmanship used to build and decorate a property but also with its ethos and spirit of generosity. Debates about the relationship between pampering and price point gave rise to a whole new category dedicated to bargains, precisely because a great hotel stay has as much to do with incalculable qualities like the emotional intelligence of the staff as it does with the painstaking restoration of gilded coffers in a centuries-old lobby.
Pilar Guzmán, Editor in Chief
As for whether hotels, more than homes we see in magazines, have the power to define good design, our response is a resounding yes. In fact, we dedicated an entire section to the topic: accommodations whose design expresses the best of a culture. By virtue of the fact that they let you "live" in a borrowed space for a period of time, hotels go beyond decorative fantasies. They are places where you get to try on a new identity—a lifestyle or a persona far different from your own. You may have a house filled with French Second Empire antiques but love spending a few nights at the monastic Temple Hotel in Beijing because it's an aesthetic departure from your regular life. And the Segera Retreat on Kenya's Laikipia Plateau, a testament to the owner's sense of refinement and adventure, might make you fast-track your plan B for a more nomadic life.
I love the idea that Hanya recently floated of parking a photographer in the lobby of a high-end city hotel to capture guests swanning down the runway, as it were (see The Chedi Andermatt in Switzerland). Granted, some of our favorite hotels are decidedly unfashion-y, but the notion reminded us that luxury hotels are in some ways a last bastion of glamour, tradition, and good old-fashioned manners. Or maybe a hotel lobby is more like an Italian piazza—the place where pairs of friends, siblings, or spouses stroll arm in arm to see and be seen.
If the first half of this issue is a love letter to our favorite new hotels, the second half is an ode to those undiscovered places whose charms exist in the absence of hotel infrastructure. In Paso Robles, on California's gorgeous but unsung Central Coast, one of the popular places to stay costs just $65 a night, yet the area has some of the most exciting food and wine in the country. Similarly, Waiheke, an island off the coast of Auckland where the good life still exists with incredible beauty and simplicity, preserves its under-the-radar status with a long-standing tradition of inns and rentals. It goes without saying, however, that we'd be the first to book a room if a great new hotel opened up in either place.