Interior Design Ideas

What to look at before you choose a room category

Hotel photography flattens everything. Two rooms in the same property, at rates that differ by a third, look identical online and feel nothing alike — because one faces the valley and one faces the car park, because one has a real armchair and the other has a bench, because the ceiling in one is high enough to make the heating useless.

This section looks closely at alpine interiors: how light is handled in rooms that face north for six months, how storage is solved when guests arrive with skis and boots, which materials survive a season, and why the smallest category is sometimes the best one in the building. It is written to be useful at the moment you are choosing between two lines on a booking page.

Where a specific room is worth asking for by name, we say so in the destination selections — Switzerland, Italy, France.