With the curtains drawn
Draw the curtains in most hotel rooms built in the last twenty years and you could be anywhere. The same pale oak. The same linen in the same shade of oatmeal. The same rain shower, the same bedside lamp with its discreet charging port, the same framed abstract chosen by someone who was asked to choose something that would offend no one. It is comfortable. It is also, very nearly, nowhere.
That is the first test I run when deciding where to stay, and it is a simple one. If I closed the curtains, would I still know which city I was in?
The answer is usually in the photographs, if you look past the ones the hotel wants you to look at. Skip the pool and the rooftop bar. Look at the corridors, the door handles, the chair in the corner of the room. Has anyone made a decision here, or has every choice been made by default? At the Hotel Locarno in Rome, the red of the Doge suite told me more than any review could have.
At Rachamankha in Chiang Mai, the decision was an architect's. Ong-ard Satrabhandhu designed it as a personal project, in the manner of the fifteenth-century Lanna temples, a few steps from the wall of Wat Phra Singh, and filled it with his own collection of Chinese and northern Thai antiques. Draw the curtains there and you are still, unmistakably, in Chiang Mai.
Which is the second thing I look for: a person behind it. Riad Mena, on the eastern edge of the Marrakech medina, was meant to be a family home. Philomena Schurer Merckoll and her mother spent the better part of a decade restoring it before she opened its doors to guests, and it still feels like hers — her books in the library, her friends among the designers and rug makers she sends you to. Places like this are rarely flawless. But they are run by people who notice things, because the place is theirs, and for a few nights, so are you.
When there is no such hotel, I look for an apartment, and the rules are the same, only stricter. I want someone's actual home, not a flat furnished for guests. Books that have been read. A kitchen that has been cooked in. A chair inherited from somebody's grandmother, a rug carried home from a trip. The things, in other words, that I try to fill The Leopard with.
And location matters, though not in the way the booking sites mean it. Casa d'Anna sits in the Sanità, a quarter of Naples most visitors never reach - a palazzo on Via dei Cristallini full of art books and portraits, with Greek tombs, more than two thousand years old, lying beneath it. I would rather be there, twenty minutes' walk from the famous things, than five minutes from them in a street that exists only to be visited. The walk is part of the stay. It is where you find the shop with no sign, the bar where the old men drink standing up, the workshop with its door propped open.
None of this is a guarantee. I have chosen badly by these rules and well by ignoring them. But the places I return to, in memory and in fact, all pass the same test. Draw the curtains, and you still know exactly where you are.