What makes a small hotel feel personal?
Hosts you can name, rooms shared with the village and service arranged in person: what a small hotel can do differently, with examples from Lana, the Mani, the Chiemgau and Sils Maria.
Size alone does not make a hotel personal, and our selection includes larger places too, from Forsthofgut in Leogang to Maryhill Estate in Skåne. What a small hotel can do is let you see who runs it, share its rooms with people who are not staying there, and arrange things for you directly. Three questions help when you choose: who is behind the hotel, which rooms are shared, and what is done for you in person?
At Chesa Marchetta in Sils Maria, an old Engadine house has become a small hotel with its own restaurant and bar. It is run by Artfarm, the hospitality company of the gallery Hauser & Wirth. Thick stone walls and wood-panelled rooms set the scale, and the evening centres on a dining room rather than a hotel lobby.
Then there are hosts you can name. At Tainaron Blue in the Mani, the architects Kostas Zouvelos and Kassiani Theodorakakou bought a ruined defensive tower in 1994, restored it over about five years and welcomed the first guests in 2015. There are four rooms, and the small restaurant cooks only for hotel guests, so the people at dinner are the people staying in the tower.
Small hotels can also be booked whole. Manoir Laurette in Bordeaux wine country has five rooms, let individually on a bed-and-breakfast basis or together for up to ten adults. The Brecon in Adelboden offers buyouts of the entire hotel for groups, with its bar, the Living Room, as the shared room in the evening.
At 1477 Reichhalter in Lana, the shared rooms are the point. The café and restaurant on the ground floor are open to outside guests too, so breakfast and dinner are not reserved for the people in the eight rooms upstairs. The rooms differ in layout and are named after people and past uses from the history of the house. Reception is not always staffed, so the inn asks for your approximate arrival time; check-in runs from 3 to 7 pm.
Service in a small hotel is often something arranged rather than offered from a list. At Agrªd Chalets in Aschau im Chiemgau, the Heinrichsberger family deliberately run no restaurant: breakfast is brought to your chalet or suite, a short evening menu offers a Bavarian platter or fondue, and the team recommends restaurants nearby. At Eumelia, a working farm near Gouves in Laconia with four guest houses, cooking classes start in the vegetable garden and the farm’s olive oil is tasted among the trees it comes from.
A large resort can be just as well run, and a small one can disappoint. But if you want to know who is cooking, where you will sit in the evening and whom to ask about the next day, look at a hotel’s hosts, its shared rooms and what it does for you in person before you look at its size.
