Independents
Outside the groups, one at a time.
Small houses, small brands, and a few private ones. Some are run by the family that owns them, some by a handful of people with a single idea, and several appear on no booking portal. What they share is that no chain stands behind them.
The programmes on this site cover the large groups, and they are worth having: the rate is the same and the stay comes with more in it. This page is the other half of the work. A house with eleven rooms on an island, run by two brothers, with a kitchen that answers to their mother. A camp of Airstreams in the Saudi desert, built by a small company that runs four or five places in the world and nothing else. A private house that takes guests for part of the year. They resemble each other in scale and in care, and in very little else.
Most of them keep no agency agreement and pay no commission, so this page earns me little and often nothing at all. They are here because leaving them out would turn the site into a catalogue of the hotels everyone else lists. I go, I stay, I write the five notes, and when you want one of them I write to the owner myself.
From the houses
Some of them, and where they are.
The names stay off this page. They come with the inspection, or by email.
Written up
Livadia, Antiparos, Greece
The Rooster
Sixteen stone cottages up a valley above Livadia Bay, reached by a dirt road with one sign on it. The only house on this site I have been back to four summers.
Adelboden, Bernese Oberland, Switzerland
The Brecon
A Welsh family's house in Adelboden, adults only, where the champagne is yours to pour and no room has a television.
Ashar Valley, AlUla, Saudi Arabia
Habitas AlUla
A camp of tented villas on the floor of a sandstone canyon in the north west of Saudi Arabia, where the rock does most of the work and the house has the sense to let it.
Melides, Alentejo, Portugal
Vermelho
Christian Louboutin's house in an Alentejo village, thirteen rooms and no two of them alike, where the red in the name is a promise the building keeps.
Ask about one
Tell me where you want to be.
The island, the month, who is travelling. I come back with the house I would choose and the room inside it, and I write to the owner myself. In English, Italian or Spanish.
Scrivimi →Or the other way
The groups, with the benefits attached.
Where a stay falls inside one of the preferred-partner programmes, the rate is the hotel's own and breakfast, a credit and an upgrade come with it.
See the programmes →
Book with Nik