About
Luxury travel writer, independent hotel reviewer, and a person who will genuinely photograph a light fitting.
About
The wobble in a table leg. The typeface on a menu. The housekeeping trolley that has been parked outside the same door since ten in the morning. My travel friends have learned to wait patiently while I photograph a light fitting.
It is a habit, and it came from work long before it came from travel.
Where it started
Before any of this, I built websites. Years and years of them.
That work is not what most people imagine. It is far less about how something looks and far more about how it feels to use. Where the eye lands first. Which single word makes someone hesitate. Why one page feels effortless and another, carrying exactly the same information, quietly makes you give up and close the tab.
You cannot do that for long without it changing the way you see everything else.
A hotel is the same problem in three dimensions. So is a restaurant. Somebody decided how you would arrive, what you would see first, where you would sit, how you would be spoken to and what you would be handed before anything else. Most guests feel the result without ever noticing the decisions behind it.
I notice the decisions. That is the honest answer to why the reviews here include the things other reviews leave out.
Read the reviews
The details
Whether the bedside table is big enough for a glass of water and a book. Whether there is a socket on the correct side of the bed. Whether the shower needs thirty seconds of guesswork before it behaves.
Whether the person on reception looked up before you reached the desk.
None of it is complicated. All of it is the difference between a room and a stay.
The same goes for a table. Good service is not the theatre of it. It is the water glass refilled without being asked, the pause before someone clears a plate, the recommendation that is genuinely what the kitchen is proudest of that night rather than whatever needs shifting.
On the road
Slowly, wherever I can. I would far rather know one neighbourhood properly than tick off six cities in a weekend.
Pam comes on most trips. Friends come on others. There are usually long breakfasts, a great deal of walking, one meal that becomes the story of the whole trip and one afternoon with absolutely nothing planned in it. That last one is not laziness. It is when a place tends to show you what it is actually like.
I write everything down while it is still fresh, because detail fades fast and detail is the entire point.
Honfleur. One square, several days.
The deal
Some stays here are hosted. Many are paid for by me. Every hosted stay is declared, and being hosted has never changed a single word of what came afterwards.
I turn down considerably more than I accept. If a place is not right for the people who read this, saying yes to it does neither of us any good.
This isn't about finding the most luxurious places.
It's about finding the places you'll still be talking about long after you've unpacked your suitcase.
Working together
The web work never entirely stopped, and I am glad of it. It means I understand the business side of hospitality as well as the guest side.
I know what a hotel needs its website to do. I know why the booking journey matters as much as the bed linen, and how a genuinely lovely property can be undone by one badly lit photograph and a contact form that does not work on a phone.
It makes me a better reviewer. It also makes me a rather particular kind of collaborator, which some brands find useful.
If that is you, there is a page for it. If you are simply here looking for somewhere lovely to stay next month, then you have arrived exactly where you should be.
Work with meWhere to next
01
Every room slept in and every table eaten at, scored and photographed.
Start reading
02
Reviews, features, photography and the website side of hospitality.
See how it works
03
Press enquiries, corrections and recommendations I ought to know about.
Get in touch
The Chic List
The stays, tables and Sunday roasts that made the cut, plus the ones that didn't, and why. No round-ups, no noise.