Alila Ventana Big Sur

Ventana Inn was designed by a man whose trade was furniture. It opened in 1975, the idea of Lawrence Spector, a Hollywood producer, and Kipp Stewart's blocks of rooms have a cabinet-maker's look: two storeys of weathered timber in a frame of posts, with ivy up the lower floor. They stand in 160 acres of redwood forest and meadow above Highway 1, where the Santa Lucia Mountains come down to the Pacific. A lawn is rounded off at the edge of the slope, and beside it the Ocean Meadow Pool faces the ocean and the redwoods at once. Higher up, among the trees, are the Japanese hot baths, shared in the manner of an onsen, and next to them the Mountain Pool, which is meant to recall the free spirit of 1970s Big Sur. It is a brief the hotel wisely leaves undefined.

Recommended for couples who would rather not spend Big Sur deciding where to eat: all three meals are in the rate, and only the alcohol is extra. Each room takes two people and nobody under 18, though it will take a dog or two as well. The Sur House cooks Mediterranean dishes from California produce, and on Friday and Saturday afternoons a mini-Airstream in a grove of redwoods adds pizza and cocktails. The hotel's chauffeur goes anywhere within three miles, which takes in Nepenthe and the Henry Miller Memorial Library, a mile down the highway. Pfeiffer Beach, with its purple-tinted sand and the Keyhole Arch, is 3.6 miles away, just out of range.