Elevating hospitality to a five-star art has been a specialty of Switzerland since the founding in 1893 of the world’s first hotel school, École hôtelière de Lausanne, located in the Lake Geneva Region in the French-speaking part of the country. With nearly 1500 lakes and 140 glaciers, as well as snow-capped mountains and a surfeit…
Given its global reputation for beauty and bounty, there’s no shortage of reasons for visiting Bordeaux—and yet it’s all the better that the city chosen as “European Best Destination 2015” offers some truly extraordinary hotels. A UNESCO World Heritage site for its 18th-century architecture, which is second only to Paris in number, Bordeaux is located in…
San Francisco has a habit of hovering in the collective gay imagination like an empyrean city beckoning at rainbow’s end. It’s the city that most often answers the question, “If you could live anywhere else…”, one of the world’s most favorite cities – and particularly for the LGBT community.
Every student of fashion—and of Madonna—immediately recognizes the iconic photographs: the Mainbocher corset, Marlene Dietrich in chiaroscuro, the Hattie Carnegie dresses—all of which are the works of the legendary German-American artist who goes by one name: Horst. One of the 20th century’s most influential fashion and portrait photographers, Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) created an extraordinary…
Some years ago, thanks in part to a certain best-selling novel and an Oscar-winning film, Marseille had such a raffish reputation that its natural attributes were often overlooked. Situated on one of the world’s most beautiful harbors with more than 35 miles of coastline, France’s second largest city offers 300 days of sunshine a year…
Even the alpacas are happy on the San Juan Islands. Located in the northwest corner of the United States between Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver, the San Juan Islands are so pristine that both residents and visitors feel a shared responsibility to maintain the ecological balance. With a mission devoted to the stewardship of whales and…
Almost 40 million people in the United States have ancestral links to Ireland. Small wonder then that the United States represents the second largest market for tourism to the Emerald Isle and that one out of every seven tourists to Ireland is from the US. For American tourists planning an Emerald Isle adventure in 2015,…
If you studied literature in college, then you might recall Asheville as the town that Thomas Wolfe depicted in his two-volume magnum opus Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again, novels that so scandalized the citizenry of Wolfe’s hometown that he very nearly never did return home to Asheville. Wouldn’t Wolfe be surprised…