United States

The United States resists a single hotel narrative in a way few other countries do, in part because of scale, and in part because its luxury properties draw on genuinely different regional traditions rather than a shared national style.

The regions, briefly

New York City anchors the country’s urban hotel tradition, dense, vertical, and built around the specific pressures of Manhattan real estate, with the newest generation of openings competing as much on architectural ambition as on service.

California’s coast and wine country run on a different register entirely: Big Sur’s cliffside lodges built to disappear into redwood forest and ocean views, and Napa Valley’s estate properties set among working vineyards, both prioritising landscape over density.

The Southeast’s mountain country, particularly the Great Smoky Mountains region of Tennessee, carries a working-farm hospitality tradition: properties built around actual agriculture, kitchen gardens, and Appalachian foodways rather than an imported luxury template.

New England, especially Vermont, extends a similar rural logic further north, historic farmhouses and barns converted into hotels that lean into the region’s dairy and maple-syrup agricultural identity rather than against it.

Hawaii and the Florida Keys represent the country’s island geography, each with its own hospitality history, Hawaii’s rooted in Native Hawaiian and Polynesian tradition, the Keys built around a smaller-scale, barefoot approach to the water.

Los Angeles, with its canyon and hillside estates, completes the picture with a hotel culture built as much around privacy and old-Hollywood history as design.