Five new hotels with great outdoor spaces

Biarritz en plein air

Paris’s Experimental Group of bars and restaurants was a pioneer of making clubby cocktails cool in the noughties. These days the group has outposts from Verbier to Menorca, via Manhattan and the Cotswolds, and Christian Louboutin is a stakeholder. Last year, it relaunched Le Regina, a 1907 landmark petit palais, as Regina Experimental, in Biarritz. Its grand, once-staid public spaces now hum with exuberant colour and pattern, courtesy of Dorothée Meilichzon.

The place to be here is Frenchie Biarritz, the hotel’s restaurant – an independent business that’s open to the public, but handily adjacent to the hotel itself. Locals and hotel guests sit at gleaming red-enamel tables that fill its wide terrace overlooking the Atlantic. Gregory Marchand, the chef, has set up Experimental addresses for success in Paris and Verbier. Here, he gets to play with some of France’s finest materia prima, from top-grade lamb and sheep’s milk cheeses to chipirons, the famous local squid, and Bayonne ham.

A Roman holiday 

Full disclosure. I arrived at Casa Monti, one of Rome’s buzzier summer 2024 openings, unsure if I was going to like it. Owned by a French company and designed by a Parisian with an eclectic style (Laura Gonzalez), with spa products by Susanne Kaufmann (excellent, but Austrian), it was unclear what the place had to do with Rome itself. Then the staff directed me to the top-floor bar: tiny, intimate, with a handful of tables and a half-dozen stools at the densely stacked, back-lit bar.

It looks pretty fabulous, decked in navy and white variations on ikat, brocades and ceramics, but the sell is its terrace: running the length of the palazzo’s top floor, planted with pretty borders of wildflowers and scattered with deep-blue enamelled tables and benches. The view extends from the Palatino to the Vittoriano – as Rome as it gets – and the sunsets are dreamy. It’s open to the public, along with another small terrace downstairs in the restaurant (also profuse with flower boxes) that overlooks the semi-hidden, remarkably quiet via Cimarra.

A Soho House sanctuary in São Paulo

Soho House’s São Paulo outpost has 32 rooms, with a fitness centre and pool bar set to open next year. It’s situated in Cidade Matarazzo, an early-20th-century complex that’s been beautifully extended and redeveloped as a multi-use lifestyle destination (Rosewood already has a presence here, in a Jean Nouvel-designed tower).

The heart of the new House will be its courtyard: generously planted with tropical greenery and home to a 68-seat all-day restaurant. The bar and both club and public sitting rooms are accessible from here, and showcase a contemporary and indigenous collection of more than 60 Brazilian artists and artisans. A phase-two opening next year will create a rooftop bar, pool and gym for members, doubling the alfresco happiness.

London’s Beaumont bounces back

The Beaumont isn’t precisely new – Londoners will recall the splash Jeremy King’s first adventure in hoteldom made when it opened in 2014 (the restaurateur exited the project in 2018). But over the past three years, a new ownership has been quietly injecting tens of millions into a rolling renovation.

Part of this has been to remake the hotel’s vast front entrance and porte-cochère, marked by a wide circular drive and an extended covered terrace. These belong to Le Magritte, the Beaumont’s bar, which is an all-day noshing destination until late in the evening. A pleasingly classic drinks menu matches nicely with seafood towers and oysters, sliders and ribeye – all with a pretty view over Brown Hart gardens and Mayfair’s Ukrainian Catholic cathedral.

Captivated in Capri

Capri isn’t as ruined as everyone loves to say. It remains one of the most ravishingly beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, it just requires a right-place, right-time strategy: book a beach club (or a boat) for the daytime hours, and venture into town at sunset, after the last aliscafo has powered out of the marina. Oetker Collection’s Hotel La Palma opened here last summer, with interiors by Francis Sultana (a Capri denizen of more than 25 years) and a restaurant overseen by Gennaro Esposito (whose Torre del Saracino restaurant over in Vico Equense on the mainland holds two Michelin stars).

Bianca, its rooftop bar-restaurant, is like no other in Capri Town, boasting near-360-degree views over pretty terraces and tiled roofs to the sea at Marina Piccola. It’s peak Sultana, with rich textiles, textures and mastery of the aqua end of the colour spectrum. But it’s also peak Esposito, which you’ll understand the second the wafer-thin shaved-truffle pizza lands at the centre of the table (many of the dishes are intended for sharing).