A Roamance Guide
The overwater bungalow has become a cliché of ambition — the default answer to a question that deserves a better one. These seven places ask more of you and give more back. None of them are warm-water-turquoise-Instagram. All of them are trips you will still be talking about in twenty years.
01 · Canada
Fogo Island, Newfoundland
An island off an island off the coast of Newfoundland. The inn stands on stilts above the North Atlantic, handmade quilts by local artists on every bed, twenty-nine suites of floor-to-ceiling ocean. The Maldives is warm and horizontal. Fogo Island is cold, vertical, and more beautiful for it. The most morally serious luxury hotel in the world — which is, it turns out, a deeply romantic thing to be.
Read the full roamance →02 · France
Massignac, Charente, Nouvelle-Aquitaine
An 11th-century stone château in the Charente countryside, 2,500 forested acres, seven silver lakes, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the old longère and a spa in a converted watermill. The estate operated privately for decades before opening as a hotel. You can still feel that — the sense that you have been permitted to enter a private world, not checked into a product.
Read the full roamance →03 · United States
Stags Leap District, Napa Valley, CA
Five suites. That is the entire inn. On a hillside above the Stags Leap District, Napa Valley falling away below you, a chef who trained with Daniel Boulud cooking a three-course breakfast for ten people. Named for poets for a reason. The intimacy here is not manufactured — it is structural.
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Canyon Point, Utah
The desert does what the Maldives claims to do — removes you from the world — more completely and with greater visual drama. Thirty-four suites arranged around a pool that wraps a three-story natural rock formation. The canyon through every window. The silence is not the silence of a hammock. It is the silence of geological time.
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Walland, Tennessee
Fifty years of tending in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. A creamery, a bakery, a charcuterie, 160,000 bottles in the cellar. The farm walk at dawn, before the day has claims on you, is the thing most guests mention last and mean most. What the Maldives has in water, Blackberry Farm has in time.
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Somerset County, NJ
A 500-acre Tudor estate on Somerset County horse country, once a Moroccan king's private retreat. The 1.3-mile driveway is intentional — you arrive already different. An underground spa, a 12-acre working farm, an evening in the Great Room where you will stop checking your phone without deciding to. Go here when you want the feeling of a place that existed before you and will exist after.
Read the full roamance →07 · Papua New Guinea
Tufi, Oro Province
Papua New Guinea's Tufi coast: coral reef below, rainforest above, no signal from the constructed world. Lolo Ata is the furthest from everything that a honeymoon can reasonably take you. The Maldives is a resort that happens to be on water. This is the water — and the world it comes from.
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