The Best Places in Belgium

Stone streets, medieval facades, and somewhere below your feet, a subterranean nightclub: Durbuy contains multitudes. Le Sanglier des Ardennes is a luxury boutique hotel where a recent change of ownership has layered contemporary design over the historical bones, giving rooms a mix of aged character and spa-like bathrooms. There's an elaborate wellness facility, a pan-global brasserie, and a Japanese-inspired grill for anyone who finds the Middle Ages a bit one-note.

A restored medieval farm less than an hour from Brussels where the stone walls give way to contemporary art and designer interiors the moment you step inside. Indrani Lodge is a rural retreat built around daily yoga classes, a heated indoor pool, and rooms that run from generously large to a 200-square-meter loft. The on-site restaurant pulls heavily from its own kitchen garden, which is the kind of detail that either seals it or doesn't.

A ten-room boutique hotel in a Limburg farmhouse that was a ruin before the family who owns it rescued it. It carries the ease of a countryside B&B and the quiet grandeur of a manor, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds. The open kitchen turns out dinner from the garden; the rooms run to bold colors and deliberately sparse decor. The Michelin Guide has it in its selected hotels list.

Six rooms crammed with curios, faux fur, and enough drawers to keep you busy for an hour. This boutique hotel in Ypres plays the eccentric card without apology, and the bar looks like a West Flanders drawing room designed by Jack White. Breakfast runs past the usual sad pastry spread into eggy crumpets with chili peppers, which sets the tone. The town itself is sobering WWI history wrapped in a rebuilt medieval shell, and the hotel is a genuinely odd counterpoint to all that weight.

A stately renovated farmhouse on a verdant plateau between the Mehaigne and Meuse valleys, Domaine de Naxhelet is a golf resort that wears its agricultural bones well, exposed beams and parquet flooring intact beneath the updates. Thirty holes designed by Martin Hawtree anchor the property, with a spa, hammam, and hot-spring baths for anyone who pulls a shoulder on the back nine. Wallonia gets overlooked, which the 33 rooms and suites here are quietly counting on.

A stately Flemish mansion in Borgloon's orchard country, Villa Copis is a boutique hotel where crystal chandeliers and hand-painted murals share space with the kind of antique writing desks that make you feel like you should be composing letters. Upper rooms get exposed brick, wood-beamed ceilings, and freestanding tubs. Weekend breakfast runs late, which is the Belgian countryside's polite way of telling you there's nowhere you need to be.

A boutique hotel built on a ledge of rock above the river Lomme, with a tower suite that has stone walls and timbered ceilings thick enough to make you forget what century you're in. The 20 rooms and suites run contemporary inside the historic shell, and the restaurant pulls its own weight. The Ardennes countryside around it does the rest.