There is no shortage of beautiful places to stay. A cabin with a perfect view. A restored farmhouse between vineyards. A hotel carved into the mountains. A pool placed exactly where the photograph needs it to be. We save those places too.
But after years of travelling across different parts of the world, staying in everything from tiny family-run guesthouses to carefully designed hotels, we have learned that beauty alone is rarely what makes a place stay with you. Usually, it is something else.
The bread still warm at breakfast because somebody baked it downstairs.
The owner who can tell you why every tree in the garden is where it is.
The old walls that were left imperfect on purpose.
The swimming pond that does not smell of chlorine.
A room that feels better than it photographs.
Or the fact that you arrived just as the vineyards outside were being harvested.
These are the things we tend to remember. And increasingly, these are the things we want Wonderful Stays to be about.
Where to stay is only half the story.
Wonderful Stays is made by the two of us: a designer and a civil engineer. That probably explains some of our curiosity. We notice when a new building sits well next to an old one. When somebody chose to preserve instead of replace. When a material will probably look better in ten years than it does today.
But we notice completely different things too. How breakfast is served. Whether the garden feels lived in or merely landscaped. Whether a place gives you a reason to stay for another hour. Whether the people running it seem to have created the hotel they genuinely wanted to create.
Years of travelling have made us much less interested in perfection. Some of the stays we love are remarkable pieces of architecture. Others are not particularly fashionable at all. They simply have soul, a strong sense of place and people who understand hospitality instinctively. For us, both belong here.
This is perhaps the part we have become most interested in. A stay always belongs to something larger. To a landscape. A village. A season. A way of eating. A road leading there. A family running it. Something being grown, cooked, celebrated or made nearby. That can completely change a journey.
South Tyrol in September is not simply the same South Tyrol with slightly warmer colours. The orchards are being picked. Vineyards are working. Crates appear beside the roads. Restaurants begin cooking differently. The landscape is no longer just scenery. A few weeks later, the story changes again. And that is often the difference between simply visiting somewhere and feeling that you arrived at exactly the right time.
We want Wonderful Stays to capture more of that. Not more places for the sake of having more places.
More reasons to care about the ones we choose.
Hotels naturally show us their best photographs. The room at golden hour. The empty pool. The breakfast table before anyone sits down. But photographs have limits. They cannot easily show why a floor plan works so well. How quiet a garden actually feels. Why an owner decided to build twelve rooms instead of twenty. What happens in the kitchen before breakfast. Or why a hotel that looks understated online becomes difficult to leave once you are there. Those are the details we want to look for.
Architecture and design will remain part of Wonderful Stays, but never as decoration alone. We are more interested in the decisions behind a place than in whether it fits a particular aesthetic.
We have not slept in every hotel on Wonderful Stays, and we do not want to suggest that we have. Some places are part of our own travels. We know how the morning feels there, which corner we kept returning to and what the professional photographs did not prepare us for. Others come to us through research, conversations, architecture, location, recommendations and the ideas behind them. We believe there is value in both.
The difference is simply one we want to make clear. A personal experience is a personal experience. An editorial selection is a considered choice.
Good curation is not about claiming to have been everywhere. It is about having a reason for every place that makes the cut.
The internet already gives us an endless supply of beautiful hotels. Wonderful Stays should add something to that. A little more curiosity. A reason to notice the building rather than just the bedroom. The people rather than just the service. The landscape rather than just the view. And sometimes, a reason to travel somewhere you had not been thinking about at all.
We will continue to collect remarkable stays. But we are just as interested in what surrounds them, what shaped them and what makes them worth the journey. Because the hotel is only where the story starts.
Where to stay is only half the story.
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