Hotels for the guests who read.

The word boutique has been laundered until it means almost nothing. We use it the old way: independent hotels, fewer than 100 rooms, with a single design vocabulary, usually owner-operated, that you cannot find in two cities at once.

The list below is genuinely small. There are perhaps two hundred hotels in the world that meet the original definition. We have stayed in most of them. The shortlist below changes about twice a year.