Paragon 700 Boutique Hotel & SPA

Ulrike Bauschke and Pascale Lauber took a wrong turn in Ostuni in 2016, went into an 18th-century palazzo to look at the architecture, and came out owning it. Ostuni is the White City and the palazzo is red, which in a white town is hard to walk past. Lauber designs interiors, and says she follows the building rather than a concept. In the Deluxe Rooms that means barrel vaults and thick stone walls; in the Paragon Suite, a frescoed ceiling almost six metres up, over a stone fireplace and a sunken bath. What she has added is less solemn. In one bedroom a round bath stands beside the bed, under a pop-art Mona Lisa. One of the baths began life as an Indian brazier, and in a Deluxe Room a South African boma, a fire bowl, now holds bathwater, the reverse of its old job.

Recommended for couples who want Ostuni's old town on the doorstep and a swim at the end of the afternoon, which no other hotel inside the walls can offer. Behind the palazzo are 1,700 square metres of garden: a 15-metre pool and, past Roman pillars at the far end, an orange grove. Breakfast is out there, and so is dinner. Indoors, Restaurant 700 cooks a seasonal Apulian menu under stone vaults for outside diners as well as guests, and Bar 700 pours its own gin, Potion 700, until late. Costa Merlata's sand is 15 to 20 minutes by car, for anyone who wants more than fifteen metres of water. Nobody under twelve stays. The spa is the old cistern, seven metres underground: a lounge walled in Himalayan salt and one treatment room, made for two, like every room in the house.