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Travel

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'

Entrance to Ómós restaurant in Abbeyleix, County Laois

Travel

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,

Travel

Five Irish Hotels for Not Going Anywhere

Five Irish hotels where rain improves the proposition. 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: a hall to get lost in, a spa built around a Japanese stone bath, a library with a bookcase that is not really a bookcase. Five Irish hotels for a weekend the forecast has already planned. Adare Manor Look up in the Great Hall and there is a stone man with toothache crouched beneath the Minstrels’ G

Travel

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

Travel

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

Travel

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