Art Hotels

It opened in 1875. It still occupies the same block where Nevsky Prospekt meets Mikhailovskaya Street.

Few hotels in the city have a better address for art. The Russian Museum stands at the end of the street, on Arts Square, and the Philharmonia concert hall is next door. The Hermitage is a straightforward walk down the avenue.

Inside, the interiors move between periods. The restaurant is the one people remember, with its Art Nouveau stained glass and a room that has hardly changed in style for more than a century.

Sloane Street, red brick, late Victorian. From the pavement it looks like a row of handsome townhouses, and that is more or less what it was.

The history is unusually literary. Lillie Langtry lived in part of the building, and Oscar Wilde was arrested in one of its rooms in 1895. The hotel does not hide either story. It keeps them close, in the names of rooms and in the collection on its walls.

After a long restoration it reopened in 2019. Guests can use the private gardens of Cadogan Place across the road, a rare thing in this part of Chelsea.

This is an estate, not a single building. A medieval hamlet sits at its centre, surrounded by vineyards, woods and the long hills of the Val d'Orcia.

The land lies near Montalcino, and wine is part of daily life here: the estate makes its own Brunello di Montalcino. The old stone houses of the borgo have been restored as suites and villas, and the valley around them is a UNESCO World Heritage landscape.

Art is quiet but real. The small church of San Michele holds a fourteenth-century fresco, and the whole village reads as a piece of careful conservation. There is also a private golf course among the hills.