About us
A guide is kept like a garden, not written like a book
Nothing here is finished once. We cut back, plant again and take out whatever has stopped carrying weight.
Why we exist
In 2014 three journalists and a former hotelier worked out that they recommended hotels to each other constantly and trusted no public recommendation at all. What existed were advertisements in the shape of prose: houses describing themselves, and portals earning a cut of every booking. What was missing was a guide that behaves like someone you know — someone you believe when they tell you not to go.
So we started paying for our own nights and writing down what actually happened: when breakfast begins, how loud the street is at six, whether you want to sit down in the common room. Forty addresses have become more than two hundred. The principle has not changed, because it is the only thing keeping the text honest.
How we choose
Nothing starts with a checklist. It starts with a night. We book anonymously, pay ourselves, arrive when the other guests arrive and leave when the house is clearing up. Only afterwards does the question come up of whether an address belongs in the guide.
The measure is simple: one place with character, lived through completely, beats ten faceless nights. We look for houses that have made a decision and stick to it, even when the decision is inconvenient. A house with no television, a house with a single evening menu, a house that switches the outdoor lights off at ten: those are positions, and positions can be described.
Exclusion follows rarely from a fault and often from vagueness. A dripping tap costs a sentence in the text; a house that cannot decide who it wants to please costs the place. We recheck every address within three years at the latest, and when the owner changes we start again from the beginning.
Standards
Editorial independence
No paid placements, no commissions, no affiliate links. No house is told before publication what will be written about it.
First hand only
We publish after a night we booked and paid for ourselves. What we were merely told stays out of the guide, however good it sounds.
Travelling responsibly
At equal quality, precedence goes to the house that is locally run, buys from its own region and keeps its consumption in proportion.
Honest to the point of omission
We do not write demolitions. We leave things out. If a well-known address is missing here, that is usually our verdict rather than an oversight.
In numbers
- 218
- houses checked
- 31
- regions
- 1,140
- nights
- 3.4 of 5
- average score
The way here
- 2014Three journalists and a former hotelier start with a list of forty houses and a shared spreadsheet.
- 2016The desk stops accepting invitations of any kind, and a third of the list disappears with them.
- 2018The first collection outside the cities: eight winter houses, all checked between December and March.
- 2021A year with almost no travel. We use it to write down the method we still select by.
- 2024Ten years, two hundred houses checked. Sixteen addresses come out because they changed hands.
- 2026The guide is kept continuously rather than published in issues, and a small international edition is added.
The desk
We publish no names and show no faces, because we book anonymously and intend to keep doing so. The desk currently consists of four writers, a photographer, a former hotel manager who checks the operational side, and an editor who reads every text against the original notes.
Tell us about a house
If you have slept somewhere you still think about, write to us. Most addresses in the guide arrived that way.
Tell us about a house →