'Particularly enjoyed', the Schlachter-Ebert family's modern chalet-style hotel has a 'spectacular setting' amid fields, facing 'a panorama of peaks', on the edge of a ski and summer resort in the Allgäu Alps.

Between Orléans and Le Mans, outside a village 18 km north of Vendôme, is this handsome, ivy-covered 19th-century former hunting lodge of Duc de La Rochefoucauld, now owned by Maryse and Guy Redon.

A large building by Berzelii Park has, since 1863, contained restaurants, bars and a theatre. Part of it is now this 'discreet and exclusive' boutique hotel.

This unusual hotel is a clever conversion of medieval houses on the side of a cliff, by the ramparts of this fashionable hill village, inland from Nice.

In the city centre, this Renaissance palace is now a 'beautiful and gracious' hotel with 'stunning' lounges filled with antiques and art treasures, and neo-classical drawings and sculpture by Giovanni Duprè, an ancestor of the present owners.

In an artists' colony up a hill near the castle (a 'charming spot'), this stylish little guest house ('At the Sign of the Crayfish') is a tasteful recreation of two wooden 18th-century farm buildings, in cobbled courtyards, on this site.

In the beautiful Jungfrau region of the Bernese Oberland, this classic hotel was built by the Hauser family in 1904. Silvia and Urs Hauser are now the 'hands-on' proprietors.

In a quietish street near the Piazza del Popolo, this Art Deco hotel opened in 1925 and later increased its size by extending into an adjacent building.

'Romantically set' in the Marais, on one of Paris's loveliest squares, this handsome 17th-century building, with creeper-draped facade and pretty front courtyard, is an elegant hotel.