Living

Houses, neighbourhoods, interiors and the habits that fill them. How somewhere is built and run, and what it is like to be there for more than an afternoon.

Often the quietest pieces in an Edit, and frequently the ones readers return to.

Published here

The Lost Poet
The Lost Poet — Four Rooms, Four Personalities
No lobby, no restaurant and four bedrooms. At the top of Portobello Road, a local design studio has made something closer to a private townhouse than a hotel, and we stayed in the pink room on the first floor.
Edit No. 37
3HB Faro
3HB Faro — A Different Side of the Algarve
A five-star hotel built into a former cinema offers something the Algarve's coastal resorts cannot: a stay in a working Portuguese city, with twenty centuries of history immediately outside the door.
Edit No. 36
The Pig at Combe
The Pig at Combe — The Country House Where the Food Comes First
An Elizabethan manor house near Gittisham, where a kitchen-garden philosophy is backed by the quality of the ingredients and genuinely excellent hospitality.
Edit No. 35
The Brentford Project
The Brentford Project — Can a Developer Rebuild a Town Centre?
Brentford has changed considerably in a remarkably short time, and the question is who the change is for.
Edit No. 34
Raffles Singapore
Raffles Singapore — The Hotel That Became the City's Memory
Some hotels become associated with a city. Raffles has had long enough to become entangled with one — and the more interesting question is what remains when you look past the mythology and actually stay there.
Edit No. 33
The George of Stamford
The George of Stamford — The Hotel the Road Left Behind
For centuries, one of the principal roads through England ran straight past The George, and coaches arrived from London and York to change horses in its yard. Then, in 1960, the A1 was diverted around Stamford and the traffic disappeared from St Martin's. The George stayed where it was, and more than six decades later that may be one of the reasons it remains such an unusually convincing hotel.
Edit No. 32
Torre Melina, Barcelona
Torre Melina — The Hotel That Put the Farmhouse Back in Its Name
For more than three decades, one of Barcelona's biggest hotels carried the name of a king. When it reopened in 2024, it took the name of the farmhouse that had been here first.
Edit No. 31
Hyll, Charingworth
Hyll — The Cotswolds Hotel That Wants You to Do Nothing
Country-house hotels have become very good at giving you things to do. Hyll has built itself around the opposite idea.
Edit No. 30
Dumbleton Hall, Evesham
Dumbleton Hall — A Cotswolds Country-House Hotel Restored From an Unusual Past
A Tudor Revival house below Bredon Hill, reopened in April 2026 as a 34-bedroom hotel. Its more unusual chapter came in 1959, when postal workers bought it as a living memorial.
Edit No. 30
CoolRooms Palacio Villapanés, Seville
Palacio Villapanés — Sleeping Inside Old Seville
Seville has plenty of hotels that borrow the language of the city's old houses. Palacio Villapanés has the advantage of actually being one.
Edit No. 29
Casa La Siesta, Vejer
Casa La Siesta — The Hotel That Started With a Field
A junior lawyer left London to learn Spanish, bought a field outside Vejer and built a hotel from salvaged materials. The search for the right tiles became Bert & May.
Edit No. 29
Beaverbrook
Beaverbrook — The Country House Estate Rebuilt Around Wellness
Churchill once came for the company. But the most interesting evolution at Beaverbrook is happening away from the main house, beneath Brian Clarke's stained glass and out in the meadow.
Edit No. 28
Foxhills, Ottershaw
Foxhills — The Country Club That Stopped Being Just a Golf Club
An abbey's woodland, an airline's unlikely investment and a manor house designed by Disraeli's cousin. Foxhills has spent two centuries finding new reasons to exist.
Edit No. 28
Villa Grand Voile, La Rochelle
Villa Grand Voile — Eleven Rooms in a Shipowner's House
An 18th-century shipowner's mansion, turned into eleven rooms by a three-Michelin-star chef and his sommelier partner. Every room is named after something from the sea.
Edit No. 27
Hôtel Le Garage, Biarritz
Hôtel Le Garage — The Garage That Kept Its Arches
A carriage shed, an aero club, a garage for some of the finest cars arriving in Biarritz, then thirty years behind closed doors. The arches never went anywhere.
Edit No. 27

From the archive

Earlier living pieces, from Edits 01–26. These were published on Vitae and still live there.