An enduring hotel obsession.

We are obsessed with hotels. With travelling, with architecture and design, and most of all with the moment you walk into a hotel and know you have found a good one. It is nearly always something small that gives it away: a fire going in the courtyard after dark in Bozeman, a record player in the room in Denver with a library of records to choose from, a roof in Seville that holds the sun in January.

Holidays matter. They are the time to stop, to rest properly, and to see something new: another city, another kitchen, another way of doing things. For years that meant boutique hotels, cities explored on foot and beaches with nobody else on them. It also meant a walking tour of Mies van der Rohe's Chicago in the February wind, which not all of us agreed was a holiday.

Now there are children, and the list has grown. The right room matters as much as the right view: one where everybody sleeps, so the grown-ups get the rest they came for. Then the things that keep children happy and make the days easier, so the adults can still switch off. What has not changed is the standard. A hotel for a family does not have to be a compromise on design or on quality, and the best ones are not.

This site is where we keep them. Some hotels on it are ones we have stayed in, and say so; the rest are recommendations, chosen from the lists and reviews we trust, and say that too. Each is marked plainly as one for a couple, the way we used to travel, or for a family, the way we do now.