From a ranch in Napa Valley to a wellness retreat in Punta Mita, Mexico, here are the places where
checking in could change your view of the world.

BY THE ESQUIRE EDITORSPUBLISHED: APR 12, 2023

You can encounter inspiration in many different forms at a great hotel. It might be as simple as a stunning view. Standing on a balcony at the Maybourne Riviera, on the Côte d’Azur, I took in an expanse of sea and sky unlike that of any other place in the world. There’s a reason that corner of the earth attracted painters such as Matisse and Bonnard. It’s an image to conjure when the meditation app tells you to think of a calming place. A moment that becomes a little souvenir of the soul.

Experiences like this may be tiny, but they can stick. In the kitchen at the Four Seasons Naviva, in Punta Mita, Mexico, the chef casually taught me how to prepare a salsa using a molcajete, a traditional pre-Hispanic mortar and pestle made from lava rock. It was so simple and revelatory and visceral—just charred tomatoes and jalapeños and salt—that I vowed to make it regularly with my salsa-loving children. New York’s Nine Orchard, our very first Hotel of the Year, is a place that embraces the analog, so inspiration came to me in the form of the excellent wooden speakers in my room (made by Ojas). They reminded me that good sound matters. 

Experiential travel has been a buzzword for quite some time. The cynic in me always thought of it as redundant. To travel is to experience, no? But the more I travel, the more I realize that’s not always the case. Sometimes we’re just trying to get from point A to point B. It takes commitment to notice the world around you, to be open to the new. And the very best hotels have a way of putting you in that mode.

For this second edition of our Best New Hotels list, we traveled throughout North America and Europe to find places offering more than high thread counts and hot tubs. These are the spots that changed us in big and small ways. We hope you get to take some inspiration home from them, too. —Kevin Sintumuang 

The committed traveler, it stands to reason, always looks for authentic local color. So a stay in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood should naturally involve a few nights in a soaring, modernist hymn to the twenty-four-hour possibilities of twenty-first-century New York. Right? Non. Hotel Barrière Fouquet’s, which opened recently on Greenwich Street, whiffs unmistakably and quite charmingly of Paris. For more than a hundred years, Fouquet’s existed as one of the grandest of all Parisian café-restaurants. In 2006, it entered the hotel business when it was reopened with one-hundred-plus luxury rooms added by the Barrière Group above and around the original café. The New York hotel is the first U.S. venture of the group, which maintains properties in some of the most chichi resorts in Europe. Its inherent Frenchness is both obvious and lightly done. The staff offer a singsongy “Bonjour” when you pass them in the corridor. In the rooms, the furnishings are postmodern curvy takes on deco, and the toile-de-Jouy-style wallpaper is about as French as you can get in room decor, until you stand up close and realize it’s actually composed entirely of cartoony New York street scenes. With a relatively low room count—just ninety-seven in total, including a two-story Grand Appartement Terrasse—the hotel feels quiet and intimate. There’s just a single low-key bar, the Brasserie Fouquet’s New York, and the Par Ici Café, which doubles as the breakfast spot and where, reassuringly, the prices have been imported from Paris along with the style. Rooms from $900 —Nick Sullivan

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a43484591/best-new-hotels-2023/