Insignia experts have chosen the most romantic hotels made for a loved-up weekend in the UK and Europe.
Bauer Palazzo, Venice
The creation of dynamic young hotelier Francesca Bortolotto Possati, who inherited the hotel from her grandfather, Il Palazzo has become a serious option for escape for Valentine’s weekend. Its decor is restrained, but its quiet sense of antique style grows on one after the ubiquitous Venetian gilt-and-brocade experience. For romantic getaway book the room number 846, a bright, mansard room with views over the rooftops on two sides. Make sure you make it up to the hotel’s famous rooftop terrace, where you can throw back a bellini overlooking the spellbinding views.
Hotel Verride Palácio Santa Catarina, Lisbon
Spend
Soho House, Barcelona
Pocket-sized, seductive and the most flirtacious location for a date in Barcelona. Soho House Barcelona is in a restored 18th-century building on the Plaça del Duc de Medinaceli in the city’s Gothic Quarter neighborhood, with rooms that face the Port Vell harbor. The pale olive-coloured panelling will have you checking for secret passageways, and the rotary porcelain light switches have something of Downton about them, as do the thickly upholstered curtains and solid antique chests. On the rooftop terrace, the air is redolent with the scent of herbs and fragrant Mediterranean shrubs.
Hotel Rosewood, London
The style of the interiors is difficult to characterise, by turns demure and decadent, muted and glossy, traditional and contemporary. The overall effect is dazzling. The perpetually jammed Scarfe’s Bar and the elegantly elongated Mirror Room are at either end of an exquisitely lit bronze corridor that insulates the lobby from the outside world. The Holborn Dining Room, run by ex-Ivy head chef Des McDonald, adds a lively brasserie buzz.
