Travel | ALCYNE

Hospitality

Rules, for Keeps

The home of London’s oldest restaurant has been given to the National Trust. The unusual arrangement should ensure that very little changes. Rules has survived two world wars, ten monarchs and London’s periodic enthusiasm for demolishing its own history. Its latest change is rather more reassuring. The building on Maiden Lane where the restaurant has traded for 228 years has been given to the National Trust. Thomas Rule opened it as an oyster house in 1798, and it soon became a fixture of thea

Hospitality

The Wolseley, Without Corbin and King

The checkerboard floor is coming to New York. The people who taught the room its manners are not. The Wolseley is coming to New York, although “coming” makes the whole thing sound rather more straightforward than it is. Its address, 130 West 44th Street, has already spent years as a hotel. Built in 1905 for The Lambs, a theatrical club, the building was designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White and later became The Chatwal, with The Lambs Club restaurant downstairs. Hyatt ended its asso

Hospitality

Four Suitcases Worth Taking Seriously

Aluminium, fibreboard, and a plastic shell pressed to look like woven leather. Most suitcases are sold on the promise that travel will become effortless once the correct piece of polycarbonate has been purchased. Airports expose the limits of that argument quickly. The better cases make a smaller claim. Most of that claim rests on the shell: what it is made of, and what happens to it after a few years in the care of baggage handlers. A few are also good-looking. Rimowa Classic Cabin Rimowa'

Hospitality

Porto Heli Was Already Somewhere

For decades this stretch of the Peloponnese was known mostly to people who already had houses there. It now has two global hotel brands, an Irish packaging financier and close to €2 billion of planned investment. Porto Heli left almost no impression. A small waterfront, a few tavernas, not much else that fixed itself in memory. Beyond the town the road emptied quickly. The houses were mostly along the coast around Agios Emilianos, set well back behind walls and hedges, and their scale was easie

Entrance to Ómós restaurant in Abbeyleix, County Laois

Hospitality

A House Called Ómós

In Abbeyleix, a small town in Ireland’s Midlands, chef Cúán Greene has turned a derelict Victorian house into a restaurant and guesthouse built almost entirely by people he already knew. In September last year, Millbrook House was still without a roof. The Victorian building, once part of the de Vesci family's Abbey Leix estate, had spent years in decline. Its internal walls had collapsed, vegetation had taken hold and little remained beyond the original shell. By July, it had reopened as Ómós,

Hospitality

Five Irish Hotels for Not Going Anywhere

By Friday afternoon, the rain has settled in and any plan involving the car has lost its charm. This is when a hotel begins to earn its keep.

Hospitality

Five European Hotels That Still Feel Like Someone Chose Everything

Four you can book now. One you cannot. All five have something most luxury hotels spend a great deal of money trying to simulate: a point of view. The expensive hotel is remarkably easy to recognise. Pale stone, excellent sheets, a sculptural chair, a bathroom large enough to make you reconsider your own housing situation. Nothing about them is badly designed, and you could move half the furniture between them without anyone noticing. The five below are different. Someone made decisions, some

Villa at Tierras above Mononaftis, on Crete’s north coast

Hospitality

The Hotel Is Down the Hill

The Orfanake family has spent 35 years building hotels in Crete. At Tierras, much of the hotel has been moved somewhere else. Roē, the smallest of the five villas at Tierras, has a suspended infinity pool, 115 square metres of terrace, a barbecue, private parking and a washing machine. Tierras sits above Mononaftis on Crete’s north coast, around 20 minutes from Heraklion airport. Each villa has its own pool and kitchen, and housekeeping comes between nine and two. A chef can cook in the house,

Palacio de los Ángeles hotel in Haro, Rioja, with interiors by Trenchs Studio

Hospitality

Haro, Paris, London.

For more than a century, Rioja’s wine capital has had an improbable habit of finding itself connected to the wider world. A new hotel suggests the visitors may finally be staying longer. Haro has long had a grand little saying about itself: “Haro, París y Londres.” The town links it to its early embrace of electricity, a story that has not suffered from repetition. In 1890 Haro became one of the first Spanish towns to introduce electric public lighting, a novelty visible to passengers arriving