Anantara

Every Anantara we’ve stayed at works the local culture into the stay without it feeling staged. When we walked into Anantara Peace Haven in Tangalle, on Sri Lanka’s south coast, a group of local women were singing in the lobby — normally that lands as tacky, and this didn’t. We’d come with a newborn and wanted somewhere we wouldn’t have to leave. Palm trees screened our villa’s pool, monkeys played in them, and every so often a coconut picker climbed up, cut a few loose, opened them and brought them over while we lay there. One of our best meals never happened in a restaurant: a chef and a guide collected me in a tuk tuk after breakfast, walked me through the markets for dambala, snake beans and eggplants I’d never seen, and back at the hotel we turned the bag into about five curries.

The Marker in Dublin does the same thing with Ireland. The lobby’s geometry copies the hexagonal volcanic rock of the Giant’s Causeway, and the hotel takes its name from the iron markers along the 82-mile Grand Canal that told boat traffic how far they had left — the last one stood in the square the hotel now sits on. Colin Farrell was in the lobby when we checked in. It rained the whole stay, so we drank on the roof under heat lamps with blankets.