Hub Porteño

In a town whose trendier neighborhoods are positively bursting with boutique hotels, there’s truly nothing quite like Recoleta’s Hub Porteño, an eleven-room homage to the signifying power of marble and to the grand old city of Buenos Aires itself. Its proprietors land somewhere between hoteliers, civic boosters and high-end inbound tour operators, their project as much a rose-colored lens on the city as it is a base from which to explore. If you’ll forgive us for getting a little misty-eyed about it, you’re not so much booking a room as you’re booking an experience — a lovely place to stay, yes, but also a staff dedicated to getting you into the top restaurants, or showing you around the coolest estancia out in the countryside, or booking your tickets to the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, if that’s your thing.

It’s all included in the price of your stay — the meals they book for you, a private vehicle and guide (if you enjoy traveling that way), your seats at the polo match. Just give them a sense of your tastes and interests, and they’ll take care of the rest. As you step off the street (and it’s a street with a certain cachet amongst locals who care about addresses), you enter a sort of portal into Hub’s vision of Buenos Aires — a portal bedecked in white marble, if you can find it beneath all the gleaming layers of polish. Through the old-fashioned wood-paneled bar, past the ultra-modern restaurant with a tree running through it (and a former El Bulli chef manning the burners), and finally up to your room, which puts to shame the slapped-together “design hotels” in other parts of town.

The spacious rooms are fitted out in modern Argentine style, with wool textiles, animal hides on the hardwood floors, leather headboards over the bed and lots of natural light. The bathrooms, of course, are covered in marble, some of the mirrors gilded in, well, gold. Up on the roof is a sofa-covered terrace. Surrounded by climbing vines and views of the city, with a bar at your disposal, it’s about as far from the street traffic as you could get without leaving the city. And it’s just about as far from the thumping clubs in other parts of town — though if you’re into thumping clubs and other parts of town, the staff at Hub can take you there, too.

Please note: Children under 12 years of age are not permitted at Hub Porteño.