Luxury Hotels|Restaurants|Resorts
The early afternoon sunshine is streaming through my wide-open window. There’s a gentle breeze carrying with it the chitter-chatter from the terrace down below. I’m curled up on my sun-kissed armchair, a book in one hand, and a glass of chilled rosé in the other. No children demanding snacks, my to-do list firmly cast to the back of my mind. This moment is my definition of perfection.
There is a precise moment, mid-manoeuvre in a strong crosswind on the surface of the Indian Ocean, when you understand exactly how a seaplane docks. It does not glide in serenely like a swan. It fights. Our pilot had the throttles open, one engine forward, the other thrown into reverse, the whole aircraft pivoting against the wind while we ran the length of a neighbouring island that was not even our destination.
A large SUV appears entirely at home pulling up to a grand historic building, as though it has merely returned from a light bout of pheasant disturbance. A discreet German saloon also looks suitable, particularly if it is muted in colour, electric-silent and wafting across the pea shingle.
But a bright purple Lotus? This is not discreet. It does not sidle quietly into an open forecourt and hope not to be noticed. It arrives with the visual and audible subtlety of a quality-street wrapper at a funeral.
As part of our Mazda Tour, we paid a stylish detour to The Sloane Club to shop, sip, and savour Chelsea’s charms.
While the forever upmarket district of Kensington in West London remains a magnet for the wealthy and famous, with Kensington Palace Gardens still one of Britain's most expensive residential streets, housing properties owned by billionaires like Lakshmi Mittal and Roman Abramovich, not many people know of the area’s longstanding cultural history, and links with some of the greatest writers in English literature.
The best holidays begin well before you land. Mine started on a SkyAlps turboprop out of a small, deeply civilised airport called Bolzano, where the security queue takes approximately the same amount of time as tying your shoelaces and the bar is somewhere you would happily choose to sit on a free afternoon. No theatre, no performance, no baffling queues for things you did not ask for: just a compact, calm, elegant little terminal and a flight that feels like the beginning of something good. Bolzano is, without much competition, my favourite airport in Europe.
A pine-scented Italian mountain refuge beneath Monte Bianco where folklore, food, skiing, and serious pleasure converge, and where leaving feels faintly disloyal
Courmayeur sits at the foot of Mont Blanc with the quiet confidence of a place that knows exactly who it is. It has no need to shout. Unlike many Alpine resorts engineered for throughput and spectacle, this is a real town with a proper centre, cobbled streets, stone houses, and a rhythm dictated as much by weather and tradition as by ski lifts and restaurant bookings.
The Priory Wareham was the final stop on our Porsche Cayenne GTS tour of Devon and Cornwall, and if you're going to end a drive through some of England's finest countryside, ending it beside the River Frome with a 16th-century monastery waiting at the door is doing it properly.
Driving a Porsche on a Devon beach, arriving by sea tractor, and staying in a 1930s Art Deco palace on its own tidal island near Bigbury-on-Sea turns a weekend into a genuine adventure, with historic suites, exceptional dining, and Atlantic drama that lingers long after you leave.
Arrival: The Theatre Begins Before You Step on the Island
A Porsche a Peninsula and a Hotel That Perches Above the Waves
