The iconic French fashion house has taken over a Berkeley Square townhouse to celebrate 130 years of its monogram, and the result is exactly as good as you’d expect.

No pretension, no fuss; just generous portions and the kind of carb-forward comfort that makes a grey London afternoon considerably more bearable. There is a particular kind of Italian restaurant …

There are people who have always known about acupuncture, who have grown up with it, who consider it as unremarkable as paracetamol. I am not one of those people. I arrived at The HVN on Knightsbridge with the particular mix of curiosity and cautious optimism that belongs to first-timers who have heard enough from enough people to finally stop putting it off. What I hadn’t accounted for was leaving with the urge to book three more sessions before I’d even reached the pavement.

We have identified ten properties across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East where the experience of traveling as a solo woman has been most consistently thought through at the level that matters: not the brochure, but the actual stay.

The Vinothérapie Spa belongs to Les Sources de Caudalie, which sits on the 78-hectare grounds of a Grand Cru Classé estate whose vines run almost to the spa building itself.

Everyone has the overnight train fantasy. The window steaming up as the countryside darkens, a glass of something decent on a small table, the particular quality of sleep that only motion seems to produce, waking somewhere new to pale morning light and the sensation that travel has actually happened rather than merely been endured. It is a good fantasy. The question is whether it survives contact with the booking process, the actual rolling stock, and the man in the corridor who wants to discuss his journey at eleven-thirty at night.