Best Hotels

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

There’s something rather amazing, it has to be said, in a few hours to be air-lifted from one season to another, to override providence, to jump 20 degrees in temperature, to swap a dull, grim cloudy rain-sodden day for a bright, sun-drenched, wonderfully warm climate. How good to sleep deeply to the sound of waves with their own rhythmic heartbeat crashing or lapping and the gentle tinkering from a forest of masts.

They do it so well. The Italians that is. Such imagination and such refinement in best utilising their impossible precipices and improbable shapes and angles.

For I had come to Lake Iseo, an hour from Milan’s Linate airport and called Sebino from the Latin for ‘double-hooked’ and divided between Bergamo and Brescia. It’s wonderfully punctuated with a dozen towns, some medieval.

The Thurlestone Hotel boasts a rich and fascinating history, one that elegantly interweaves a celebrated local dynasty, the Grose family, with the golden age of the British seaside holiday.