Hotel De Witte Lelie

There are hotels that bowl you over with their undeniable hotel-ness: the doorman, the bellhop, the smiling concierge and the hustling waiters, pushing room service carts up and down the corridors. And then there are places that are barely hotels at all, little more than a comfortable and exquisitely designed guest house, trading all the pomp for a more personal charm, privacy and intimacy.

Hotel De Witte Lelie, the White Lily, is quite plainly an example of the latter genre. Here three seventeenth-century canal houses have been joined together to create Antwerp’s most luxurious small hotel. You can take the name almost as literally as you like; the expansive public spaces are swathed in plush white rugs, sofas and armchairs, with more than a few lilies to be seen, and the guest rooms are white-on-white and lighter than air, contemporary rather than modernist, as stylish and elegant as any in this fashionable city.

That’s not a typo — Antwerp is not just a port city, and the European center of the diamond trade, but the epicenter of a Belgian fashion explosion as well, and your fellow guests at Hotel De Witte Lelie are just as likely to be stylists or designers as they are traveling businessmen or diamond importers. Let’s just say you may wish to consider dressing for the breakfast buffet.

After that, there’s little to be had in terms of services, but it would be churlish to complain. This is no urban resort, simply a stylish and exquisitely comfortable pied à terre from which to explore the museums, boutiques and restaurants of this charming city.