I love snowboarding, my girlfriend Rosie loves to dance, and we both love to travel. A late night discussion on where to spend a week’s winter break quickly prompted a challenge along the lines of a school playground taunt: “I’ll try yours if you try mine.”
But if Rosie was going to strap a snowboard to [...]

1. Gravetye Manor, Sussex
Gravetye celebrates 50 years as a hotel this May, and over 400 years of beeswax polish and log fires as a dwelling. They don’t make Elizabethan manors like they used to, and if they did, you can bet it [...]

When tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke died in 1925, he bequeathed half of his $200 million fortune to an endowment. The other half he left to his 12-year-old daughter Doris, an inheritance estimated to be equivalent to $1 billion in today’s dollars. But once you’ve wandered the grounds of Shangri La, you understand the true [...]

Boutique Week Luxury Bootcamp, Crete
Before I’d even packed I had decided that this was a ridiculous idea, tailored for idiots with far bigger wallets than intellects. Who in their right mind would pay more than two grand to be exercised to exhaustion and dieted to starvation by Joe Fournier, a former England basketball [...]

Kuala Lumpur is still a traditional guesthouse stronghold, but there has been an increase in gussied-up guesthouses. Each new player offers a “concept”, usually something to do with bearable budget or cheap chic. Still missing in the accommodation landscape is a colonial revival for the mid-rangers (hint, hint, prospective entrepreneurs).
1. Number Eight Guesthouse
Escape [...]

They’re invited to every restaurant opening, pick up at every bar and they talk to everyone. Wherever you are in the world, the person who knows best is sat upfront, behind the wheel. We asked cabbies around the globe for tips on the best venues their city has to offer.
Las Vegas
Andrew Knatovich, Las Vegas [...]

I had known Brandon - from San Francisco, he said - for all of two hours. He rides the money markets on weekdays and the powder fields come the weekend. But while the skier’s mantra in most resorts is ‘no friends on a powder day’, he was the epitome of generous bonhomie.
‘I got first tracks [...]

From boutique hotels and opera houses on Tenerife to surfing and modernist architecture on Lanzarote, so widely have the alternatives to traditional Canary Island package resorts been reported over recent years that it surely can’t be long before someone starts flying the flag for the islands’ tackier side once more.
But not yet. Because one of [...]

Music is Jamaica’s lifeblood, and much of it starts here: sandwiched innocuously between downtown workshops, a steaming, clunking 40-year-old record press at Tuff Gong Studios is churning out seven-inches. It’s coaxed into action by a grey-bearded Rasta in dirty blue overalls who pulls and thumps lumps of hot wax into shape in between puffs on [...]

Letter of the week
My partner was 40 recently and as it’s always been his dream to go to the Monaco Grand Prix, I thought I’d surprise him with tickets for this year’s event in May. However, it looks like we may be sleeping in our car! Seemingly anywhere half decent is booked up, and the [...]