Casa de las Flores - Hotel Boutique Lanzarote

Gigi de Vidal is a costume designer, and Casa de las Flores is a house she has dressed. She and Óscar Cubillo, a former hotel executive, found the Canarian mansion of 1785 in a quiet corner of Teguise, Lanzarote's old capital, after it had stood empty for five years, and took four more to restore it. The archways, the high ceilings and the courtyard stayed; the rest is whitewash, volcanic stone and their own art collection. Round leather chairs sit on a rug striped like a zebra crossing, and above one bed small cushion-shaped forms scatter up the plaster as if they had escaped, which leaves the pillows below looking well behaved. The house runs on the sun and keeps no single-use plastic.

Recommended for two people who would rather have Lanzarote's old capital than its resorts: every room sleeps two, and nobody under fourteen is taken. The house is built around breakfast, six courses cooked to order by Óscar himself from ten each morning and served in the courtyard on plates hand-painted by Nuria Blanco. There is no restaurant, so dinner is out in the old town, and the honesty bar in the courtyard handles the nightcap on trust. Ask for El Patio, which has the only pool in the house, heated, and a kitchen of its own. The Sunday market fills the main square and the streets outside the door, and Playa de Famara, where the island's surfers go, is a 14-minute taxi ride. The Castillo de Santa Bárbara watches over all of it from the top of the Guanapay volcano, half an hour's walk uphill, and El Balcón, upstairs, looks toward it without the climb.