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Hip Hotels Atlas

by Herbert Ypma

Thames and Hudson, $390

Western travel writing doesn't cater much for easterners. Westerners head east to expand their consciousness, while easterners go west for a taste of how things are done, or so we are to believe. The genre is decades behind the times.

Fortunately, Herbert Ypma's Hip Hotels Atlas of groovy places to stay that serve as destinations in their own right doesn't treat the east as exotica. The choice of destinations reflects the belief Asians consider places close to home as culturally desirable to travel to as any secluded villa in Tuscany.

The latest in the Hip Hotels series, the Atlas is a coffee-table book that might be found next to Louisa Jones' Gardens in Provence or a tome on English manor houses, but it's far more international in flavour. After all, no one is truly a seasoned traveller until they've hung out on India's secluded beaches, visited Luang Prabang, and, perhaps, enjoyed the pre-revolutionary splendour of a certain jet-set dinner club in Beijing.

Rome, London and Paris are no longer enough.

It's not just for the super-rich. The hotels range from US$55 a night to more than US$1,000. There's a golf course inspired by painter Huang Gongwang, which preserves the natural landscape of Hangzhou - the attached hotel, a dream of paper magnate Bengo Cheng, resembles a Taoist temple. There are secluded beaches in Sri Lanka  and a set of beach houses in Vietnam built by a cold war general who lives under near house arrest. An island off La Rochelle, as yet undiscovered by tourists, is listed, as is an old money-inspired hotel on an isolated Bahamas island.

The selection of destinations seems driven by the idea of travel as not simply going somewhere else but entering an alternative state of mind. Why else would a Nepalese hotel rebuild wooden buildings in the tradition newari fashion, or a ghost town in Colorado be converted into a series of luxury suites that preserve a sense of abandonment? Hip Hotels Atlas offers travel for the cutting-edge mental sophisticate.

That's not to say it lacks wonderful villas. One in Tuscany, run by an aristocratic couple, has a collection of art described by National Geographic as worthy of the Metropolitan Museum. It lists Getty's villa north of Rome, and one hotel is 'the only place to stay in St Tropez', if you don't happen to own a villa.

Hip Hotels Atlas is not a guidebook; it doesn't tell you what sights to see. It's a book to dream from.



Hip Hotels Atlas