The Best Hotels That Used to Be Something Else

A hotel built to look old is a set. These ten were built as something else — homes, mostly, and one fortress — and became places to stay later, which is why the walls, floors and rooms are shaped the way they are. None of them is a former palace; those have a collection of their own.

The oldest is a castle. The Parador de Carmona occupies a 14th-century Moorish fortress on the hill above Carmona, with vaulted stone courtyards looking over the plain, twenty minutes from Seville. In Uçhisar, Les Maisons de Cappadoce are real cave houses — some cut straight into the rock — that the French architect Jacques Avizou began buying up abandoned in the 1990s and spent more than twenty years restoring, with a kitchen in nearly every one.

Then the townhouses and mansions. Ainotsuji Machiya is a restored wooden machiya in Kanazawa's old merchant quarter, a few tatami rooms in a neighbourhood that kept its old street plan. Riad Al Moussika in Marrakech is a 19th-century mansion that belonged to a Marrakech aristocrat, rooms opening onto its central courtyard rather than a corridor. The Chedi Al Bait in Sharjah is a cluster of restored courtyard houses, wind towers and coral-stone walls still doing the cooling they always did. Rastrello is a medieval palazzo inside the walls of Panicale, above Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and Voltes Residences a stone house inside the medieval walls of Mesta on Chios.

The Tabard Inn in Washington was made in 1922 by knocking three Victorian rowhouses on N Street together — and it has run as a hotel ever since, the oldest in the city still operating continuously.

Finland closes with two country houses. Tertti Manor, outside Mikkeli, is a working farmhouse turned hotel with six rooms and a kitchen that grows much of its own produce. Haikko Manor is a 19th-century manor house in a waterside park just outside Porvoo, now a hotel and spa.