Travel 3 minutes 23 December 2022

The Best New Hotel Designs of the Year

We combed through the hundreds of incredible hotels added to the MICHELIN Guide in the past year and selected those with the most style and the biggest personalities.

We’ve sifted through every hotel added to the MICHELIN Guide hotel selection in 2022. These are our picks for the year's best overall designs.

The chosen hotels are multi-dimensional, notable for their interiors, exteriors, and how well they communicate with their location. They’re uncompromising and unafraid, each one crafting its own bold direction and sticking with it consistently throughout the property. 

Every hotel in our selection must have exceptional design that matches the high quality of its service and the value it brings to its community. That's a prerequisite, so this was no easy exercise. But we've managed to narrow things down nonetheless, training our focus on those hotels that are practically dripping with personality and singular style. Enjoy.


Dexamenes Seaside Hotel
Amaliada, Greece

Once a winery, this beachside plot in the western Peloponnese has found its true calling, its weathered century-old concrete forms converted into the stunning, industrial-chic Dexamenes Seaside Hotel. Owner Nikos Karaflos and architects K-Studio have achieved maximal effect with light-handed interventions, removing the winemaking machinery and converting the concrete storage tanks into rooms.

Book Dexamenes Seaside Hotel on the MICHELIN Guide →


Château Voltaire
Paris, France

The ultra-chic Château Voltaire is named for the fashion brand Zadig & Voltaire, for which hotelier Thierry Gillier is better known. For this venture, Mr. Gillier enlisted creative director Franck Durand and the Parisian architecture studio Festen to translate his aesthetic into a hospitality language, and the resulting hotel is every bit as stylish as its star-studded genealogy would suggest.

Book Château Voltaire on the MICHELIN Guide →


Sacred House
Ürgüp, Türkiye

After a stunning renovation a handful of years back, Sacred House returned to our selection in 2022. The mansion is two and a half centuries old, and was for a time a Christian church, as the name may well have led you to guess. Though it was restored from near-ruin within living memory by its present owners, at times Sacred House feels authentically medieval — antiques abound, and bare stone walls go a long way in setting a mood.

Book Sacred House on the MICHELIN Guide →


The Venice Venice Hotel
Venice, Italy

The owners of Venice Venice took inspiration from the avant-garde spirit that’s always been an integral part of Venetian life. While the historic structure remains immaculately preserved, the hotel is not a Renaissance period piece. Venice Venice is connected more closely to the Venice of the Biennale, and is furnished and decorated with design pieces and artworks from a number of disparate movements.

Book The Venice Venice Hotel on the MICHELIN Guide →


Nordelaia
Cremolino, Italy

It’s hard to imagine a hospitality experience much more delicious than a farmhouse hotel in the hills of Piedmont. Nordelaia begins with an 800-year-old farmhouse, extensively reimagined by the London-based design studio These White Walls. The result is still beautifully rustic but now also unmistakably modern, full of historical details interwoven with modern fixtures and furnishings.

Book Nordelaia on the MICHELIN Guide →


The Pinch
Charleston, South Carolina

In the heart of Charleston, two historic Victorian-era structures and one contemporary one have been unified to create The Pinch. The Victorian inspiration is present throughout with bold wallpapers and period ornaments, yet updated through a modern color sense and eclectic furnishings and artworks. But it’s the supremely stylish kitchens in each room that might be the most impressive part of The Pinch.

Book The Pinch on the MICHELIN Guide →


The Madrona
Healdsburg, California

The Madrona may be new, but the Mansion, the hotel’s ornate centerpiece, certainly isn’t — this 1881 mansion was built in Aesthetic Movement style. The interiors done by co-owner and designer Jay Jeffers, are eclectic, incorporating period elements as well as modern interventions, a very fine art collection, and a boatload of antiques collected during several lifetimes’ worth of travels.

Book The Madrona on the MICHELIN Guide →


Seminary Hill
Callicoon, New York

Seminary Hill Orchard & Cidery has drawn attention for its cidery structure, which takes the traditional barn-style silhouette in a modern and sustainable direction. But what brings us to Seminary Hill is a pair of houses renovated by local hospitality experts Homestedt: the Boarding House, a 17-room boutique hotel in a Shaker-inspired contemporary-classic style that’s rustic and restful without being overtly retro.

Book Seminary Hill on the MICHELIN Guide →


Columns
New Orleans, Louisiana

This late 19th-century Italianate villa draws its name from its most distinctive architectural feature. Columns was built in 1883 as a private residence, and after a thorough renovation, it’s a Victorian fantasy world, as ornate and colorful as any hotel in town. Rooms and suites show plenty of variety. All are decorated in a style you could call maximalist, out of eclectic elements that feel more collected than designed.

Book Columns on the MICHELIN Guide →


Ace Hotel Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Ace’s first hotel in Canada is a new build, but one with plenty of vintage inspiration, designed by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects and Atelier Ace. The curvaceous brick, concrete, and wooden forms feel retro-futuristic, and the lobby’s floor, if you look carefully, seems to hover in the air, suspended from the ceiling’s concrete arches by judiciously placed metal rods. The hotel is unique, but still identifiably Ace.

Book Ace Hotel Toronto on the MICHELIN Guide →


Paradero Todos Santos
Todos Santos, Mexico

An hour up the west coast of Baja California from the hedonistic holiday hotspot of Cabo San Lucas is a place whose charms are a little more austere, though spectacular in their own right: Paradero Todos Santos. A luxurious all-suite boutique hotel in a highly disciplined Brutalist style seeks, at least in part, to draw the eye outward, to the landscape architecture and the untouched surrounding ecosystems.

Book Paradero Todos Santos on the MICHELIN Guide →


Lost Lindenberg
Pekutatan, Indonesia

Lost Lindenberg finds itself on the west coast of Bali in the quiet seaside village of Pekutatan, with the jungle at its back and a long black lava-sand beach right out front. The playful design by architects Alexis Dornier and Maximilian Jencquel, is unusual with a series of treehouse-like towers connected by elevated walkways. The materials are natural, and with just eight rooms, the footprint is impressively small.

Book Lost Lindenberg on the MICHELIN Guide →


The Standard Bangkok
Bangkok, Thailand

Occupying the lower floors of the mixed-use King Power Mahanakhon Building, The Standard Bangkok is a bit of an outlier on this list. With 155 rooms and suites, it’s not an intimate hotel, though it can feel like one. The design, by the Spanish-Italian Hayon Studio, is cosmopolitan in the best way, with rooms that are swanky, stylish, and comfortable — about all you can hope for from a hotel in a spiraling, 78-story tower.

Book The Standard Bangkok on the MICHELIN Guide →


The MICHELIN Guide hotel selection has over 6,000 of the world's most exciting hotels.


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