Honor Roll

Award season is here. Our editors have selected their favorite designs from hotels added to the Tablet selection in the past year. Here are the winners for Europe.

We’ve sifted through every hotel added to our selection in 2024 and picked those we think have the best overall designs. This is a subjective list, as all such lists are, but we were guided by a set of five objective criteria.

We looked for creativity: Hotels that put on clear display the personality, originality, and ingenuity of their creators.
We looked for novelty: Hotels with unique themes, one-of-a-kind arrangements, and idiosyncratic interpretations of hospitality.
We looked for dedication: Hotels with a complete and thorough commitment to their visual narrative, down to the door handles and deck chairs.
We looked for compatibility: Hotels that complement, improve, reflect, and protect their surrounding cultures and landscapes.
We looked for emotion: As in, hotels that stirred within us the most awe or delight or satisfaction at having seen something this group of grizzled hotel veterans had never quite seen done the same way before.

We looked and we looked and we looked and we were left with the hotels below, which represent the best new Tablet designs of Europe (USA and the rest of the world will follow). We hope you enjoy.

Precise Tale Poggio Alla Sala

Montepulciano, Italy

Precise Tale Poggio Alla Sala is perfectly capable of delivering the classic experience that makes Tuscany a perennially desirable destination, but with a point of view that makes its version a particularly memorable one. Its designers took inspiration from the Silk Routes that once connected Italy to the far East, to create a style that’s local but heavily influenced by places as distant as Istanbul and Shanghai.

Domaine Les Oliviers de Palombaggia

Porto Vecchio, Corsica

When staying on an island with its own unique language and character, it makes sense to stay in a hotel that’s properly rooted in the place. Enter Domaine Les Oliviers de Palombaggia. Instead of conventional rooms, the hotel has stone cottages inspired by the island’s traditional architecture. And it’s not just family-run, it’s family-built — one member of the local Bougon family, a daughter, designed the villas, while a father-and-son duo handled the carpentry.

Acro Suites

Heraklion, Greece

Acro Suites brings Santorini-style cliffside romance and carved-rock drama to the north coast of Crete. This adults-only hotel is the smaller and more reserved sister to the Sea Side Resort, right next door — but is perfectly capable of standing on its own. Its 49 suites and villas are equipped with all the necessities, including views out to sea and private plunge pools, either hugging the cliff edge or carved into stone caves.

Souki Lodges & Spa

Cabrières, France

Souki Lodges & Spa feels a bit like a private discovery. In fact, despite its middle-of-nowhere location outside the village of Cabrières, it’s one of the most exclusive and sought-after places to stay in the region. The boutique hotel is the passion project of a pair of locally based designers who imagined a sleek, eco-friendly getaway built right into the landscape at the foot of the Pic de Vissou.

Abbaye des Vaux-de-Cernay

Cernay-la-ville, France

The raw material of Abbaye des Vaux-de-Cernay is a medieval abbey that was restored and expanded in the late 19th century by the Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild; today, after another round of careful attention, it’s been transformed once more, into a thoroughly impressive country escape. Its rooms occupy the original abbey building as well as the reconditioned stables; they’re joined by the freestanding, self-contained pavilions, for families or larger parties.

Jaskółka Dom i Spa

Szklarska Poręba, Poland

Perched on a high mountain slope, the verandas of Jaskółka Dom i Spa face an expanse of pine forests and snowcapped peaks. This landmark inn opened in 1894 and served a variety of purposes over the years, before undergoing extensive renovations and reopening as a luxury boutique accommodation. The interiors are just as impressive as the views, with high coffered ceilings, ornate chandeliers, original woodwork, and decorative stained glass panels.

Lesante Cape Resort & Villas

Zakynthos, Greece

Lesante Cape Resort & Villas pays homage to Zakynthian culture, from architecture to cuisine. It’s a village within a village, namely the seaside hamlet of Akrotiri; the hotel has its own taverna, shops, church, café, and central square. And while the grand archways, whitewashed buildings, and scenic olive trees mirror elements of the world outside, there’s a luxurious spin and a modern sensibility to this particular interpretation of the island lifestyle.

Solo Palacio

Quirós, Spain

Set in the lush green mountains of Asturias, Solo Palacio is an unusual hotel, to say the least. The building is a 16th-century palace, but the concept is wabi-sabi, as in the Japanese idea of taking pleasure in imperfection and impermanence. Accordingly, the estate has been restored, but not to perfection; and while the experience is a luxurious one, everything feels unpretentiously rough-edged and charmingly handmade.

Aethos Monterosa

Champoluc AO, Italy

Aethos Monterosa is a hotel whose mission is to place as few obstacles as possible between you and the adventure you’ve come to the Alps to experience. That’s why there’s a rock-climbing wall in the lobby, and, in winter, an ice-climbing wall on the exterior of the hotel. Clearly, this is not your grandfather’s Alpine lodge — its contemporary architecture and its modern construction, in concrete, wood, and weathered metal, see to that.

The Brecon

Adelboden, Switzerland

Unlike some other places in the Swiss Alps, Adelboden is less about opulence and more about the classic pleasures of a mountain town. It’s fitting, then, that its top luxury hotel is as substantial as it is stylish. The Brecon resembles a classic Alpine lodge, but its interiors, by Dutch design firm Nicemakers, combine mid-century modernist gestures and chic contemporary design pieces with the warmth you expect from a Swiss mountainside hotel.

Hotel Liberty

Offenburg, Germany

Turning a prison into a luxury hotel is no small task. It helps that Offenburg’s former penal institution, which comprises a pair of simple but elegant brick buildings that date back to the mid-19th century, was somewhat aesthetically pleasing — and it’s essential, too, that the Hotel Liberty’s designers were interested in preserving some of the prison’s character instead of completely overhauling the place.

Estelle Manor

North Leigh, UK

It’s not all that common for the proprietors of an English country-house hotel to engage the services of a New York–based interior design studio. But then again Roman and Williams isn’t an ordinary design firm, and they’re perfectly capable of adapting their work to an overseas setting — Estelle Manor isn’t a New Yorker’s caricature of Oxfordshire, but a fantastic and fanatically detailed vision of timeless country-house hospitality.

The Pergola

Cascais, Portugal

In 1925, a local businessman renovated a pair of side-by-side chalets a short stroll from the beach in Cascais, then gifted them to his two daughters. They remained in the family until the 1980s, when one of the chalets was turned into the town’s first hotel. Many of the chalet’s original features remain at the Pergola — cool stone floors, hand-painted tiles, a grand iron staircase — and the historic garden beside it is still one of the property’s finest assets.

Palacio Arriluce Hotel

Getxo, Spain

Getxo is a seaside village where Bilbao’s industrial bourgeoisie built vacation villas at the turn of the century. One of the most notable was a palace on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Biscay, since transformed into the Palacio Arriluce Hotel. The aristocratic interiors have been carefully restored, the croquet lawn is perfectly manicured, the quaint library is stocked with rare books, and the spa pays homage to the neighborhood’s history as a wellness retreat.

The Blackpine Hotel

Escaldes-Engordany, Andorra

There’s a certain variety of black pine that only grows in the highest elevations of the Andorran Pyrenees, and the Blackpine Hotel has the unusual distinction of being crafted almost entirely out of it. Its pine-lined rooms and suites are sleek and sculptural, as if they’ve been carved out of solid blocks of wood, then gently sanded down to reveal supple surfaces along walls, ceilings, and floors.