Frankly, if you can make it in the hippest quarters of London and Paris, you can make it in the Alps. The Experimental Chalet is stylistically miles ahead of the vast majority of ski hotels (to say nothing of its nightlife). The interiors, by Milanese architect Fabrizio Casiraghi, pay homage to the modernist styles that were current during the postwar ski boom, and the light, minimalist look is a refreshing departure from the old Alpine standard.

“Bed & Beverage” is the concept, and it’s a particularly relevant one for Pigalle, one of the new centers of Parisian nightlife. Here a group of globetrotting cocktail experts have teamed up with designer Dorothée Meilichzon to create what essentially amounts to a very stylish cocktail and wine bar with 37 delightfully bohemian rooms attached. Don’t expect the full palace-hotel treatment — this is the Grand Pigalle Hotel, not the Pigalle Grand Hotel — but do expect a surplus of personality, a vibrant environment, and a stay worth remembering (though we can’t actually guarantee that your memory will cooperate, faced with a mile-long cocktail list and over 200 Italian wines).

Don’t be fooled by the name — the Experimental Cocktail Club is more than just an adventurous group of drinkers. They’ve got bars by that name in Paris, New York, and London, as well as a couple of excellent Parisian boutique hotels and some highly regarded London restaurants. And now they’ve added the Henrietta Hotel & Restaurant to their portfolio, in what might just be the very heart of central London: Covent Garden.

Grands Boulevards makes its home in a freestanding house, or hôtel particulier, that dates back to the days of the Revolution. It’s a rarity in this busy corner of Paris, and it’s hidden from the street, accessible only via a concealed passageway. This means not just the frisson of being in on a secret, but it means a measure of peace and quiet, too — this hotel knows how to party, but it also knows how to get a good night’s sleep.

What began as the Experimental Cocktail Club was always destined for bigger things, but it’s still surprising, in retrospect, that the path from a hip bar in Paris to a beautiful farmhouse hotel on the Balearic island of Menorca took barely a decade to map out. Experimental Menorca joins sister hotels in London, Paris, and Venice, a diverse set of experiences that have little in common besides the creative personnel involved and — what’s always been the Experimental Group’s greatest asset — the flawless good taste that seems to underwrite the whole enterprise.

As with all the Experimental hotels the lion’s share of the credit has to go to Dorothée Meilichzon, the architect and designer responsible for the hotel — though in this case the bar, no less memorable a space, was designed by Cristina Celestino, as a tribute to the late Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. The rooms are compact, space being rather at a premium in this precariously situated island city, but they’re comfortable, even a bit decadent, and some come with views of the Giudecca Canal. And the restaurant serves sustainable and locally sourced Venetian fare, and is a fixture on the nightlife scene for locals and travelers alike.

There’s the hedonistic party side of Ibiza, and the secluded farmhouse side — and, at the Montesol Experimental, a version of the island that’s urbane and sophisticated. This hotel’s 1933 façade hints at the elegance of what’s inside, though it does little to prepare you for the crisp, contemporary interiors, to say nothing of the ultra-hip restaurant and rooftop lounge.

“From the outside, Cowley Manor Experimental is an absolutely classical Italianate mansion, actually loosely based on Rome’s Villa Borghese. Seemingly a traditional English country house, this appears from a distance to be the sort of place one might set a BBC adaptation of a nineteenth-century literary classic. In fact, Lewis Carroll is purported to have first met Alice Liddell in the gardens of this very estate.

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