The Best Places to Stay in Pentagon & around

Seventeenth-century flagstones underfoot, Magritte prints on the walls, and Belgian chocolates at turndown: this Rocco Forte hotel sits steps from the Grand Place in a Spanish Renaissance building that spent its early life as a prison. The rooms are quietly luxurious, Flemish antique furnishings alongside leather headboards and proper showerheads, with views that peak in the rooftop-facing suite. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

1. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Four Star
2. Michelin Guide 1 Key

A Neoclassical building on the Place des Martyrs that could have gone stiff and grand, but Juliana plays it as a boutique hotel instead, 37 rooms and six suites with mansard roofs, timbered ceilings, and enough murals to keep you from staring at your phone. Art fills every corner of the public spaces too. The spa and indoor pool sit downstairs, a swanky restaurant and dramatically low-lit bar round things out, and the Magritte Museum is a short walk away. Michelin awarded it 2 Keys.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Keys
2. Forbes Travel Guide Forbes Recommended

The former European HQ of IBM, a hulking brutalist block beside the Botanical Garden, is now a hotel where co-working slides into cocktails without anyone noticing the transition. Rooms run to velvet and concrete, retro palettes, and enough technology to shame whatever IBM left behind. A modern Peruvian restaurant and a rooftop bar with Mexican food and views over the garden rooftops round out the argument for staying in.

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide
2. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide 1 Key

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

Fifty-nine rooms dressed in deep blue with Art Deco flourishes that stop just short of theatrical: Craves is a boutique hotel a short walk from the Grand Place, and it wears its retro glamour with a straight face. The in-house restaurant, Le Conteur, leans into a travel-worn, Middle Eastern-inflected menu and an interior full of details that reveal themselves slowly. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A 23-room boutique hotel tucked inside the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, one of Brussels' great 19th-century arcades, with parquet floors, vaulted ceilings, and vintage-inspired tilework that do most of the decorating. The Grand Place is around the corner, which means the location does the heavy lifting while the rooms stay quietly stylish, soundproofed, and contemporary without pretending the history isn't there. A connected bistro and a bookshop round out the picture nicely.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

Bathrooms styled like photographic darkrooms, then splattered with day-glo paint: that's your first clue about what kind of hotel this is. Nhow Brussels Bloom sits beside Le Botanique and leans hard into contemporary art, with gallery-spare guest rooms, prominent artworks, and a lobby full of overlapping social spaces. A waffle van handles breakfast duties. The cocktail bar, oddly, is the most restrained room in the building.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

A former Dominican abbey turned boutique hotel, which means the bones are genuinely ecclesiastical even if the interiors, redone by Dutch firm FG Stijl, are considerably more comfortable than anything the original tenants knew. Feather beds, espresso machines, and bathrooms worth missing meetings for fill the rooms. A courtyard, a spa, and a bar that serves food until 11pm round things out, with the opera house and good shopping just outside.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels

1. Michelin Guide Selected Hotels