The Originals

As we put a bow on our 25th year in business, we take a look back at some of the best hotels from our 1st year in business.

Skip down to the hotels.

When Tablet launched in 2000, the hotel industry looked a lot different than it does today. Not only were we the first boutique hotel curators, boutique hotels themselves were a novelty, just starting on their journey from the fringe to the mainstream. There were nearly 2.5 billion fewer people on earth, and seemingly the same number fewer hotels worth getting excited about.

We witnessed incredible change over the next quarter century, as boutique hotels influenced every aspect of hospitality and instigated a full-scale reimagining of what a hotel should be. Standards were raised across the board, and character became just as important as the number of amenities available. Finally, you could pick hotels to match your personality.

Back to 2000 and the list below: Tablet came online with hundreds of hotels to choose from. Most of the first boutique hotels were accounted for, as were many of the world’s grand dames, luxe resorts, and historic inns. Unlike now, there wasn’t much else in between except the kinds of chain hotels you don’t expect to see from us (but even those have massively stepped up their game).

There are so many great accommodation options these days, with no end in sight to the growth. As a result, a lot more work is required to identify which are truly extraordinary and deserving of being in our selection. It’s not work when you love your job, though. And we love our jobs. We’re grateful to have played our small role in the boutique hotel revolution, and to have brought together so many wonderful establishments and guests.

2025 was an unforgettable year for us. We hope it was for you as well. Wishing you peace, joy, and untroubled travels this holiday season — from all of us here at Tablet.

Strawberry Hill

Irish Town, Jamaica

The rooms and bungalows at Strawberry Hill are built to meticulous nineteenth-century specifications. You sleep in mahogany four-poster beds shrouded in muslin, and gaze out at the stunning mountain landscape while swinging in your hammock. It was created by Chris Blackwell as a salon for friends like Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, so, continuing in the tradition, guests are encouraged to mingle, debate, and jam.

Copacabana Palace

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Belmond Copacabana Palace is still the place to live the fantasy of the Rio of decades gone by. Built in 1923, at the birth of the Jazz Age, this gleaming white edifice towers over Copacabana Beach, patterned after a couple of other classic seaside hotels, the Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes. Copacabana Beach is the kind of place you have to see before you die — why not do it in high style?

The Mercer

New York City, NY, USA

The first SoHo loft hotel is still the definitive entry in the genre. This 19th-century Romanesque Revival building was filled with artists’ lofts during the neighborhood’s postwar heyday, and its late-’90s renovation at the hands of superstar interior designer Christian Liaigre transformed it into one of the best of the first generation of boutique hotels.

Splendido

Portofino, Italy

Safe to say this one lives up to its name. Splendido, a Belmond Hotel, is a Ligurian classic, and a longtime favorite among Italian grand hotels — Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor was the first person to sign the guest book in 1901. Today it’s as fine as it ever was, subtly modernized and continually updated, but always true to the historical spirit of the original Splendido.

Park Hyatt Tokyo

Tokyo, Japan

Even before its star turn in 2003’s Lost in Translation, Park Hyatt Tokyo was well known as one of the first proper luxury hotels to truly embrace contemporary design. A 2025 renovation by Paris-based Studio Jouin Manku’s has it back at the top of the modern luxury-hotel game. It’s also literally at the top of the 52-story Shinjuku Park Tower, a position that lends it extraordinary views of Tokyo.

Fairmont Le Château Frontenac

Quebec City, Canada

The grand dame of the Canadian railway hotels, Château Frontenac is Québec City’s most famous landmark, a century-old castle high on a bluff over the St. Lawrence river; towering above the city’s Vieux Québec historic district. It’s a tourist attraction in its own right, and there’s nothing subtle about it — past the sightseers in the lobby is a vast and labyrinthine hotel of some six hundred rooms across six wings.

Chateau Marmont

West Hollywood, CA, USA

What needs to be said about Chateau Marmont at this point, a hotel that’s cooler than all of us put together? Built in 1929 to mimic the Chateau D’Amboise, a castle in France’s Loire Valley, its French late Gothic Flamboyant style includes fluted pillars, vaulted ceilings, and the perfect amount of heavy, dark wood. The drama of the building more than matches the drama that has taken place within its walls.

La Mamounia

Marrakech, Morocco

La Mamounia is pure fantasy: huge, bright, and excessive, a glittering combination of the Art Deco and Moroccan traditions with mosaics, painted columns, and gleaming marble floors. Turbaned waiters, belly dancers, and doormen wearing fezes greet a new celebrity set that includes the Clintons, Naomi Campbell and Tom Cruise. There are five restaurants, a spa, and a casino, and rooms modeled after railway carriages and ocean liners.

Claridge’s

London, UK

Claridge’s is by any lights one of the best hotels in London, and it’s almost certainly the poshest. Even today, this Mayfair landmark — where the crowned heads of Europe came to wait out the Second World War — remains splendidly and timelessly Art Deco. Stroll past the black awning into an entry foyer with Lalique vases, gilded columns, a sweeping staircase ornamented with brass banister that is polished daily.

Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi

Santa Fe, NM, USA

Inn of the Anasazi — named for the ancient civilization that built the region’s distinctive cliff dwellings — offers an unusually authentic and culturally sensitive New Mexican experience. The interiors are antique in style, and the work of New Mexican and Native American artists and craftspeople is featured prominently throughout. It’s also just about as central as a Santa Fe hotel can get, just steps from the Plaza.

Château de la Chèvre d’Or

Èze, France

The medieval village of Eze is one of the most amazing places on the Côte d’Azur, offering spectacular sweeping ocean views that simply can’t be matched from any lower elevation. Here, Château de la Chèvre d’Or began its life as a private residence, and as it’s grown, many of the surrounding houses have been absorbed into the hotel. As a result the 45 rooms and suites are scattered throughout the village.

Claris Hotel & Spa GL

Barcelona, Spain

Only in architecturally adventurous Barcelona would one find a downtown grand hotel in a style like this; Claris Hotel & Spa GL is a postmodern mélange of the modern and the classic. Obviously anything but your typical chain hotel, the Claris is owned by the art collector Jordi Clos, who has outfitted the hotel’s first floor with a collection of pre-Columbian artworks, and placed Egyptian carvings, Turkish kilims and Hindu sculptures in the guest rooms.

The Clarence

Dublin, Ireland

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, the Clarence is owned by Bono and the Edge, of U2 fame. And yes, the Clarence is more or less the official stopover for actors, musicians and the like — but we’d argue that this has little to do with the owners’ marquee value, and everything to do with the fact that, at bottom, it’s simply a well-designed and thoughtfully conceived hotel.

The Sukhothai Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand

Most of Asia’s grand hotels are ostentatious skyscrapers, but the Sukhothai breaks the mold — this low-slung and labyrinthine complex, designed by Ed Tuttle (of Aman fame) sprawls over six acres, and functions as an island of calm amidst the bustle of that other City of Angels. Gardens, courtyards and lotus pools await around every corner, and the restaurant floats on a man-made lake.

Establishment Hotel

Sydney, Australia

The Establishment Hotel is near-perfect, a thirty-one-room boutique that, as they say, does exactly what it says on the tin; offers chic and comfortable lodging in a convenient city location, and attracts the town’s best and brightest young things to its bars and restaurants. Rooms are either strikingly Japanese, with black floorboards and loft-style timbered ceilings, with dashes of vivid color, or soothingly international.

Hotel Goldener Hirsch

Salzburg, Austria

Hotel Goldener Hirsch has existed in one form or another since 1407, the year of the first mention in the city’s archives of an inn on this spot in Salzburg’s Old Town, just down the road from the birthplace of Mozart. Its present incarnation dates back to 1948, and is today a delightful trip backwards through time, decorated in decades-old antiques, designed more in the style of a rustic lodge than a baroque palace.