Rosewood Miramar Beach

Miramar means behold the sea, and in 1876 Josiah and Emmeline Doulton gave the name to a few cottages they built on this Montecito beach for visiting friends and family. The hotel there now, opened in 2019, takes the name literally. Its Beach House stands on pilings over the sand, white clapboard with crossed-lattice rails along the balconies and the mountains behind. In a sea-facing bedroom the walls are ticking-striped, and French doors open on a balcony with nothing past the rail but the Pacific. Back from the beach, the curved staircase in the Manor House takes its sweep from blueprints Paul Williams drew in 1933. Less romantically, the railway runs past the estate at ground level, and the rooms answer it with base isolators and noise-cancelling technology from superyachts: a yacht's defences, turned on a train.

Recommended for couples and families who want Santa Barbara with the Pacific at the bottom of the steps, Coast Village Road ten minutes' walk away and downtown a quarter of an hour by car. The Surf Club takes beginners as well as old hands, which spares anyone saying which they are, and paddleboards and kayaks go out from the hotel's own stretch of sand. Children have Rosewood Explorers, paid for separately. Caruso's, the oceanfront dining room, holds a Michelin star and builds its menu around the farmers and fishermen of the Central Coast. And from 1 June to Labor Day a swim raft is moored off the beach, with a lifeguard on watch from nine to five, as one first was in 1917. The hotel is from 2019; the raft has seniority.