Four Seasons

Four Seasons doesn’t have a house look. The Tented Camp in northern Thailand is fifteen tents on the Ruak River, with a copper bathtub beside the bed and windows so big that from under the covers you can see three countries — Burma across the water, Laos beyond it. It doubles as an elephant sanctuary, and the elephants walk the same dirt paths as guests. At breakfast they took bananas out of our hands.

Gresham Palace in Budapest is the far end of the same brand: a 1906 Art Nouveau landmark, left neglected for years, that Four Seasons took on in 1998. The lobby floor holds 1,021,200 mosaic tiles. Ask for a Danube room — the Chain Bridge outside goes gold at night. Ours was small, which is normal in Europe, and we were barely in it. Ten Trinity Square in London isn’t really a hotel at all: a two-bedroom serviced apartment where our son Axel got his own room, with a crib and a bottle warmer already set up.

What repeats is the people. In Milan the concierge made eleven recommendations over one stay and we took ten. At Il Palagio in Florence, which held a Michelin star when we ate there, I asked Chef Vito Mollica why my cacio e pepe comes out a stringy mess and his doesn’t. Buy better cheese, he said, and move the pasta to a heated dish before you add it — never the pot you boiled it in. In Dubai the iPad by the bed could charter a helicopter or order a yacht. We used it for room service and to close the curtains.