The Best Hotels in Hobart

Two historic buildings share a postcode and a renovation: a sandstone pile from the 1800s and a 1940s Art Deco building, now stitched together into one of Hobart's grander hotels. The Tasman, a Luxury Collection Hotel, holds the Michelin Guide's one Key. Rooms run luxurious and the public spaces are generous, with an Italian restaurant, a lounge, and a craft cocktail bar named Mary Mary doing their bit for the cause.

A former jam factory on Hobart's waterfront, now a hotel and working gallery hung with hundreds of works by Tasmanian artists. Exposed brick, vaulted timber ceilings, and old factory equipment coexist with all-glass bathrooms and individually designed suites, some with sandstone walls or harbor terraces. The IXL Long Bar backs onto a wall of original tin cans. It holds a Michelin Key.

A Regency-era farmhouse sitting between Hobart and the imposing face of Mount Wellington, the Islington is a boutique hotel that's had a thorough architectural conversation with itself, a glass conservatory addition grafted onto the 19th-century bones. The managers live on-site, so the intimacy is genuine if the room service is not. A chef handles dinner in that conservatory. No children under 16, which explains the atmosphere before you even unpack. It holds a Michelin Key.

Two converted 19th-century warehouses on Salamanca Place, now a luxury boutique hotel where original timbers and exposed brick share the room with living plants and green-tiled bathrooms. Every room runs a little different, and some have balconies or soaking tubs. No restaurant on site, but the waterfront is right there and so is most of what makes Hobart worth visiting. The Michelin Guide has it in their Selected Hotels list.

A Victorian villa on a Glebe hilltop, where a fifth-generation descendant of the original owner still pours the drinks and his wife teaches Spanish cooking in the kitchen. It's a boutique guesthouse with antiques gathered across several continents, a Tasmanian-stocked honesty bar in the Drawing Room, and intact servants' quarters available to guests. The kind of place where the history isn't framed on a wall but living in the next room.

Eight freestanding pavilions perched over the River Derwent, each named for an Australian artist whose work hangs in the adjacent Museum of Old and New Art. It's a hotel, more or less, though "museum guesthouse with a vineyard" gets closer to the truth. Rooms run to full kitchens and laundry, shared facilities include a heated infinity pool and sauna, and the Moorilla wine bar pours from grapes grown on the same land you're sleeping on.