The Best Places to Stay and Do in the United States

A boutique hotel sitting right on Redondo Beach's harbor, Shade trades on a location that drew resort-builders here long before the boutique concept existed. Rooms lean coastal-modern without overdoing the nautical clichés, and the South Bay light does most of the decorating. It holds a spot in the Michelin Selected Hotels list, which tracks if you're after somewhere small and considered rather than a big anonymous beach block.

Bold colors and graphic wallpaper give this boutique hotel a personality that most luxury properties pay consultants to sand away. The Admiral sits in downtown Mobile, drawing on the city's French colonial roots as a loose aesthetic thread through the décor. Rooms run from comfortable to genuinely suite-level, and the building houses a café, cocktail bar, and a chophouse, so you rarely have to leave.

A luxury hotel in Birmingham, Michigan that feels like it has been around forever, even though it hasn't. The Townsend pulls off a particular trick: the kind of hushed, buttoned-up grandeur that usually takes generations to accumulate. It's the sort of place where the staff remembers your name and the decor has never once considered being trendy. A solid base for exploring Detroit's suburbs without roughing it.

Stump-shaped tables, owl-embroidered pillows, and toy soldiers in Mason jars: this hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley commits to its woodland whimsy without apology. A greenhouse lobby opens onto a lawn-fringed pool, and rooms come with record players if you need a break from disrupting industries. A beer garden, a café, and the signature Valley Goat restaurant round things out for families and road warriors who've had enough of bland business parks.

A boutique hotel on the Rockaway Beach strip, designed by Morris Adjmi, the architect behind Brooklyn's Wythe, so it has that same knowing downtown confidence planted squarely in deep Queens. The 53 rooms look out over the Atlantic or Jamaica Bay, the palette runs to sand and ocean blue, and the beach-and-pool scene in summer makes the subway commute from midtown feel like a reasonable sacrifice.

Twenty-two rooms tucked into a hillside above the Pacific, with a garden courtyard quiet enough to make you forget Laguna Beach has been discovered. Casa Laguna reads more like a large, well-curated bed and breakfast than a proper hotel, which is part of the appeal. The breakfast has its admirers well beyond the coast, and the spa keeps things unhurried. A Michelin Selected Hotel for travelers who'd rather feel like a houseguest than a check-in number.

Original marble fireplaces, Ford family archives, and a signed note from Walt Disney in the lobby set the tone at this historic hotel on the edge of Dearborn. Rooms are stately and well-kept, and the bar named for Ford's road-trip companions, Edison and Firestone among them, is a genuinely good excuse to stay for one more drink. It's the kind of hotel that takes its own story seriously, which turns out to be more interesting than most.

Hammetts sits right on Newport's waterfront, a contemporary hotel built in a maritime-industrial style that somehow avoids every anchor motif and rope-coil you'd expect. Oversized windows look out over the marina, the palette runs crisp blue and white, and an outdoor lounge spills onto the harbor. The restaurant, Giusto, does seafood and housemade pasta with a lively bar outside. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

A block from one of Southern Maine's most beloved sandy beaches, this Colonial Revival inn in Scarborough's small waterfront district sits twenty minutes shy of Portland. Guest rooms lean hard into seaside style, with vibrant colors and vintage postcard illustrations, while the details stay modern boutique. The on-site restaurant, Shade, serves oysters and fresh seafood on a covered porch with wine on draft.

Spanish Revival bones and bay views make this Pacific Grove hotel a more atmospheric base than the usual Monterey-area chain. Ninety-nine rooms and suites, many with balconies, carry the architecture's old California mood without feeling stuck in it. The Caledonian restaurant handles modern American with Californian wines. Pebble Beach, Carmel, and Cannery Row are all just minutes down the road.

The parking lot is gone, replaced by outdoor lounge space, which tells you everything about how Valencia Hotel Group rethought the classic mid-century courtyard motel. This boutique hotel in the Dallas suburb of Irving keeps the bones and swaps the rest for contemporary rooms with high-end details. Two Mules Cantina handles Tex-Mex, a beer garden runs live music on weekends, and the Salt Tequila Bar is exactly what it sounds like.

Water on three sides puts Tampa Bay practically inside the room at this boutique hotel on Rocky Point. The interiors lean modernist and minimal, which sounds cold until you see how well it plays against the view. There's an outdoor pool, a ninth-floor fitness center, and Rox Rooftop Bar sits higher than anything else in town, if you need a reason to skip the gym.

The rooms have soaring dark cherry beams against white-and-sand walls, private terraces, and marble bathrooms with rainforest showers, giving the whole place the feel of a chic treehouse that happens to border the Caribbean. This Four Seasons resort sits deliberately far from anything, with a cascading pool facing the ocean, a golf course, tennis, a spa, and a spread of restaurants. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

The name promises more opulence than the place delivers, which turns out to be the point. This Newport boutique hotel leans into Gilded Age references with enough ironic distance that the trompe l'oeil textures and Baroque nods feel playful rather than pompous, and designer Rachel Reider's colorful signature keeps it from tipping into costume drama. Lark Hotels, the Massachusetts group behind it, has a knack for that trick.

Perched on ten acres of Narragansett Bay waterfront on Goat Island, this full-scale resort has over 200 rooms, all facing the water, and enough going on that you could skip Newport proper entirely. The marina means some guests arrive by boat, which sets the tone. Scarpetta handles Italian dinner, the Regent Lounge takes over from there, and the Seawater Spa is on hand for whoever overdid it the night before.

The tape decks in the rooms come loaded with mix tapes, which tells you everything about how seriously this mid-century motor lodge on Route 66 takes its restoration. Swanky beds, good bathrooms, and a Nordic spa with a sauna and hot tub round out a motel stay that has shed all the original era's mass-produced feel. The on-site General Store doubles as a restaurant, turning out breakfast and Roman-style pizza.

The red brick and white columns are a deliberate architectural echo of Jefferson's Academical Village up the road, which is either charming or a little on the nose depending on your mood. This Kimpton hotel trades grand gestures for something warmer inside, with a lobby that actually invites sitting down, a farm-to-table restaurant, and a craft beer bar. Five acres of botanical gardens out back connect to a trail system, with a Japanese garden and a pond along the way.

A single-story motel given a modern-rustic overhaul, LOGE Breckenridge is the kind of ski-town stay where nobody's pretending the mountain views need a chandelier to go with them. The setup is deliberately unfussy: a renovated motel block, a café and reception next door, and a bus stop close enough that the lifts are minutes away. Keystone and Copper Mountain are a short drive if you want options. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A former pocketbook factory, all red brick and industrial bones, converted into a luxury boutique hotel that arrives with more swagger than your average Hudson Valley farmhouse inn. The design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero handled the overhaul, which explains why the whole thing feels considered rather than decorated. Selected by the Michelin Guide, it sits just off Hudson's main strip, close enough to the antique shops to be convenient, far enough to feel like an escape.

A Queen Anne house on a quiet residential street a short walk from Warren Street, this boutique hotel has been renovated with enough care that the original bones still read clearly. Modern furniture and contemporary art sit alongside Matouk linens and Frette towels without any of it feeling like a mood board. Hudson has no shortage of weekend visitors with opinions, and the Amelia Hudson gives them somewhere to stay that matches the town's aesthetic without making a performance of it.

The neon sign out front dates to 1963, and the bones of this mid-century motor lodge are still intact, even after a thoughtful renovation brought it into the present. It sits on Santa Rosa Ave, which means you get the urban, workaday side of wine country rather than the manicured version, with the Sonoma Valley wineries and restaurants still close enough to make the whole trip work. Michelin's Selected Hotels lists it.

Newport is a town where "summer" is a verb and the air smells of ocean breezes and someone else's money, which makes the Attwater a quietly subversive little B&B. The rooms run to bold, contemporary color in a way that reads more Brooklyn than Colonial, though the teals and navy blues threading through the decor remind you that the Atlantic is genuinely close. A tasteful antidote to the usual grand-mansion aesthetic of the neighborhood.

A handsome brick building a block from the train station, The Wick is a Marriott Tribute Portfolio hotel that arrived just as Hudson started pulling New Yorkers back upstate in earnest. The renovated interior runs minimalist and clean, the restaurant leans on regional farms, and the Lobby Bar is doing nothing to lower the town's rising opinion of itself. Convenient, comfortable, and quietly confident about the neighborhood.

The steakhouse came first, with live lobsters and a piano player, and it's still downstairs in something close to its original form. The hotel wrapping around it is a different story entirely: a genuinely modern boutique property that would raise eyebrows in a hipper city and raises them even higher in Ann Arbor. Family-owned since forever, but clearly not coasting on it.

A loft-style hotel on the east side of the bay, equidistant from all three Bay Area airports, which tells you exactly who stays here and why. The décor runs toward the tech-forward, the rooms are high-ceilinged, and the South Bay's major campuses are a short drive in any direction. Bring a rental car; this is not a neighborhood for wandering. A Michelin Selected Hotel.

Every room faces the water at this all-suite hotel perched on a bluff above the Half Moon Bay fishing harbor. The Santa Cruz Mountains rise behind you, the Pacific stretches out in front, and the agenda writes itself: morning coffee while the boats go out, afternoon on the beach, the faint pulse of a lighthouse at night. Half Moon Bay has a way of making ambition feel faintly embarrassing, and the Beach House leans into that completely.

Heated floors in every bathroom is the kind of detail that makes a 15-room boutique hotel in Glen Ellen feel less like a weekend trip and more like borrowing a very well-appointed friend's house. Wraparound porches, oak shade, gas fireplaces in many rooms, and a low-key pool give it a residential quality that sits comfortably in the quieter, less-trafficked corner of Sonoma Valley. No restaurant, but the wineries are basically the backyard.

An old brickworks turned boutique hotel in Golden, where the Denver suburbs give way to the Rockies and people seem genuinely unsure which world they're in. The Eddy Taproom & Hotel has a rooftop patio, firepits, and a full bar attached, so you can debrief after a trail without going far. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels, which tracks for a place that reads more like a well-designed escape than a highway stopover.

A boutique hotel in Alpharetta, the small city that quietly decided it didn't need Atlanta anymore. The classical exterior plays it safe with the neighbors, but the interiors go more eclectic, mixing contemporary pieces with nods to tradition. Public spaces do real work here: CC's patio bar, a pub, and a Parisian-style conservatory give it the feel of a proper local gathering spot rather than a lobby you sprint through.

A Mediterranean Revival building on Cocoanut Row, The Vineta is Palm Beach's introduction to the Oetker Collection, the European group behind Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The 41 rooms were designed by Tino Zervudachi, who kept the grand-hotel bones while letting in enough eclectic detail to avoid feeling like a museum. Three bars and lounges means you're never far from somewhere to be seen, which in Palm Beach is less optional than it sounds.

A mid-century-styled beach hotel right where the Jacksonville road runs out at Atlantic Beach, close enough to the Atlantic that you catch the sunrise over the water from your room. The spa, a tiki bar called Soothsayer, a full restaurant, a breakfast café, and an ice cream shop mean you could plausibly never leave the property, which is either a feature or a warning depending on your disposition.

Four restored historic buildings, including a pre-Revolutionary War cottage and an old bank, make up this 42-room hotel in Kingston. The Hudson Valley revival has brought plenty of newcomers to town, but Hotel Kinsley threads its rooms through the actual bones of the place rather than building around them. Restaurant Kinsley handles dinner with New American ambitions. The Michelin Guide lists it among its selected hotels.

A rooftop lounge with craft beer and a Tesla charging station is a pretty clear statement of intent for a Hudson Valley hotel. Hotel Nyack leans hard into the urban-getaway-that-doesn't-pretend-to-be-a-farmhouse lane: loft-style rooms, a steakhouse downstairs, and enough city comfort to make you forget you crossed the Tappan Zee. For New Yorkers who want the river without the apple-picking energy.

Sferra linens and antiques sourced with an actual eye sit inside nine rooms of a hotel that has been anchoring the Athens waterfront since the Gilded Age. The Stewart House is a boutique hotel in a historic Hudson River town, with an Art Deco bar, a farm-to-table tavern, and a seasonal waterfront grill right outside. Elegant without being precious, the kind of place that makes Hudson feel less crowded than it is on a Saturday in October.

A Michelin Selected hotel on West Palm Beach's waterfront, The Ben takes its name from an old estate whose original guest list ran to Vanderbilts and presidents. Rooms lean into early Florida's tropical mood through rich textures and quality linens without turning the whole thing into a theme park. A rooftop restaurant sits above the city for Mediterranean plates and cocktails, while the ground-floor spot reworks American classics with local produce.

A comfortable hotel that plays the geography smart, sitting close enough to Newport for the beaches, mansions, and vineyards, but far enough to dodge the summer chaos. Rooms run bright and spacious, some with kitchenettes and balconies. The on-site restaurant, The Helmway, leans into New England standards like lobster rolls made with local ingredients. The Norman Bird Sanctuary is a short drive if you need an excuse to skip the car museum.

Directly across Pacific Coast Highway from the break that gave it its name, the Surfrider Malibu is a boutique hotel that took a Fifties building and quietly made it the thing Malibu somehow never had. The team behind it, a Californian architect and a couple of improbable partners, kept the bones and let the ocean do the decorating. Rooms fill fast with people who'd rather wake up to surf reports than room service carts.

Newport's seaside inns tend toward Victorian grandeur, so the Wayfinder's 1970s aesthetic reads almost as a provocation. It's a boutique hotel done for people who want to actually talk to each other, with social spaces threaded throughout, local art on the walls, and rooms that mix maritime ease with a bit of Scandinavian restraint. Coffee comes from Providence roaster Nitro, and Nomi Park handles all-day eating when you surface.

The red-brick Beaux-Arts facade on Ocean Avenue is a reminder that the Jersey Shore once attracted people who traveled with steamer trunks. This hotel carries that old-money beach-town energy into rooms with plush linens and coastal textiles that manage to feel modern rather than nautical-themed. An outdoor pool with cabanas and a tiki bar gives you a reason to avoid the boardwalk, at least until early afternoon.

The refurbished 1961 palm tree roadside sign out front tells you everything about what this boutique hotel is trying to do: resurrect a classic Texas motor court without the questionable plumbing. Car-seat upholstery, burlwood headboards, and headlamp-shaped fixtures carry the automotive theme through all 143 rooms. A restaurant, a social club, and a rooftop bar mean you can stay in all night, and AT&T Stadium is minutes away when you can't.

A Sixties mid-rise just off the boardwalk that got the full mid-century modern boutique treatment, bold colors and vintage geometry intact. The Dream Inn is a 165-room beachfront hotel that manages to feel like Santa Cruz distilled: sun-bleached, a little retro, and not trying too hard about any of it. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels, which tracks for a place that finally gave this stretch of California coast the beach hotel it deserved.

The pool has been the centerpiece of this 10-acre Santa Rosa resort since forever, and it still earns that status. The Flamingo leans hard into mid-century Modernist fantasy, which puts it closer in spirit to Palm Springs than Wine Country, a distinction the lobby's contemporary art collection only reinforces. Rooms are thoroughly renovated but keep the aesthetic. The Lazeaway Club handles pan-Pacific cooking, and the spa connects directly to a full fitness center.

Wine country has produced its own design dialect, and Kenwood Inn and Spa speaks it fluently: stone fireplaces, courtyard fountains, and enough warm terracotta to make you forget there's a highway outside. It sits on Route 12 in the Sonoma Valley, sized somewhere between an impersonal resort and an aggressively cozy B&B, which turns out to be the right call for cork-chasers and romantics arriving with a weekend and a winery list.

The landmark bell tower has been standing since the 1920s, and La Bahia is the hotel that finally caught up to it. Set on Beach Street with actual ocean views from many of its 155 rooms, this Spanish Mediterranean property is Santa Cruz's most luxurious place to sleep, with a spa, a pool, and several bars and restaurants ranging from casual poolside to coastal Californian. The rooms mix the building's original Spanish bones with something clean and contemporary.

A cluster of 19th-century buildings spread across half a city block, the Lighthouse Hotel sits next door to its namesake and directly across from the Hemingway house, which is either a selling point or a lot of literary pressure. Rooms go tropical-classic, with vintage-inspired prints and furniture alongside modern comforts. The grounds wind around an old banyan tree and pool, and the bar pours a Hemingway-inspired mojito, as one must.

Sunrise yoga on the North Shore, with the kind of setting that makes participation feel less like a chore and more like showing off. Lumeria is a wellness retreat selected by the Michelin Guide, and it leans hard into the healing arts, from meditation to organic farming, without shaming the guests who came mainly to sleep until noon. The vibe is quietly earnest rather than preachy, which puts it firmly in a different universe from Maui's mai tai resorts.

A working farmhouse aesthetic along the St. Helena Highway, this inn sits in the kind of wine country quietude where the main activity is deciding which bottle to open next. Rooms lean pastoral without being precious, and the Russian River Valley surrounds you with enough vineyard scenery to feel like you've genuinely left civilization, though civilization is about twenty minutes away when you need it.

Thirty-five acres of Willamette Valley vineyard and woodland, less than an hour from Portland, make a convincing argument for never going back to the city. The Allison Inn & Spa is a full luxury resort in pinot noir country, where the architecture nods vaguely European but never forgets it's in the Pacific Northwest. Wine country has been creeping toward Napa-level ambition for a while now, and this place has been leading the charge.

A 39-room boutique hotel on three acres above Brushy Creek in Round Rock, north of Austin, where century-old live oaks do most of the decorating. The original farmhouse on the property still stands and now holds the bar, which is the kind of detail that earns a place its character without trying. The surrounding Austin sprawl exists, technically, but you can't really tell from the grounds.

Ten rooms on the Bridgehampton stretch of the Montauk Highway, styled as a luxury motel in the way that phrase is meant to make you pause. The team behind it describes themselves as "a team of dedicated maniacs," which tracks: this is the classic motel-with-potential takeover, done with the kind of attention that turns a roadside stay into a detour worth planning around. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A rooftop pool bar named Perspective, a gallery running seasonal exhibitions, and a lounge called Gallery Lounge: the art theme at this boutique hotel is not what you'd call subtle. Part of Marriott's Autograph Collection, it has the infrastructure of a big operation behind its modernist-chic personality. Overture handles food and drink at ground level when you need a break from admiring things.

Getting to this inn requires a ferry, which is either a dealbreaker or the entire point. The island has no cars to speak of, and the inn leans into that with no TVs or phones in the rooms, just vintage furniture, local art, and views. Bikes, tennis, golf, and charter boats fill the days, and the restaurant runs on lobster, mussels, and produce from nearby farms. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A cluster of 19th-century conch houses stitched together into a 44-room boutique hotel, the Kimpton Fitch Lodge barely looks like a hotel from the street, which is half the point. The residential scale keeps things unhurried, and the outdoor pool, loaner bikes, and a nightly hosted social hour keep them social. It sits just off the waterfront, making diving, sailing, or ferry departures easy to reach without much planning.

A hotel a block from the University of Wisconsin campus that actually has something to say for itself, which is rarer in college-town lodging than it should be. The Graduate by Hilton has the feel of a place that knows its neighborhood without leaning on it too hard, cosmopolitan enough to hold its own against a school that punches well above the provincial. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

Indian Wells sits quietly between Palm Springs and Indio, and most people drive straight through to the tennis tournament and leave. The Sands Hotel and Spa gives you a reason to stay put, a boutique luxury property with the kind of design and comfort that makes the whole Coachella Valley feel like it was your idea all along. The pool situation, as you'd expect in the desert, is the center of gravity.

Sitting at the southernmost tip of the continental United States, this beach resort straddles the turquoise Atlantic and Key West's chaotic Duval Street, which is either perfect or a lot, depending on your evening plans. A midcentury overhaul swapped tired tropics for cobalt, coral, and woven rugs on wood floors. The adults-only guesthouses, set in a pair of restored Victorians next door, are the quieter bet.

Sagaponack is the Hamptons village that people in the know prefer precisely because it isn't a scene. This freshly renovated resort spreads across seven acres with 30 rooms ranging from detached bungalows with kitchenettes to suites, all done in white, navy, and sage. Beach passes, stocked lockers, and a pantry stocked with morning pastries to ice cream handle the logistics so you don't have to. Long Island's best beaches are close enough to walk.

A six-room B&B in a Colonial-era house that has Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes on the walls, which is either charming or a lot depending on your relationship with transcendentalism. The inn has been around forever and shows it in the best way: pine floors from the original build, original architectural details, and modern bathrooms that know when to stay quiet. Breakfast, a lending library, and an honor bar round out the thoughtful extras.

Named for maritime painter Winslow Homer, this collection of historic houses spreads across Key West's old district with three swimming pools and a poolside Bungalow Bar tying it all together. The rooms mix contemporary interiors with the buildings' original bones, and the common outdoor spaces are generous enough that you'll forget you're in the middle of town. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

Lines form before the doors open at this specialty seafood counter, which tells you most of what you need to know. Faroe Island salmon, live sea urchin, razor clams, and whatever else flew in that morning fill the case alongside premium tinned fish and prepared foods. The shop insists it isn't a restaurant, then sells poke banh mi and sashimi boxes to go. Wednesday's lobster roll has its own cult.

A renovated Seventies motor lodge turned adults-only boutique hotel on the Russian River, where Guerneville plays reluctant host to San Francisco weekenders seeking something more considered than a cabin rental. Modern-rustic rooms lean into the setting without going full Pottery Barn, a few come with vintage Malm fireplaces, and the spa has a saltwater pool. Breakfast arrives at your door, which is the only morning routine that makes sense out here.

Sitting at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort's aerial tram, this hotel in Teton Village is built around the assumption that you'll be outside most of the day. The 87 rooms keep things purposeful: warm oak, charcoal walls, Navajo-print textiles, and mountain photography that reminds you why you came. Wild Pine handles dinner, Unravel does coffee, and the outdoor pool and hot tub handle whatever the mountain did to your legs. Skiers in winter, hikers and bikers all summer.

Three geothermal pools fed by natural hot springs anchor this mid-century motel in Desert Hot Springs, twenty minutes outside Palm Springs proper. The name isn't clever branding; the springs predate the golf courses and the architecture pilgrims by a long stretch. Rooms wrap around the pools in classic roadside motel fashion, which means the whole thing feels like a very good idea someone had in 1955 and nobody has improved upon since.

The Mission-style archway and stone lobby fireplace survived the restoration of Ojai's oldest hotel, which is the right call. El Roblar is a 50-room boutique hotel spread across a main building, private garden bungalows, and a newer Sycamore House wing, all done in warm earthy tones with locally sourced art on the walls. It sits right on Ojai Avenue, so the valley is essentially your front yard.