Craving Texture: and why I think it's worth travelling for

Introducing ‘neurohaptics’ — and why a hotel I stayed in recently left me cold

Are Honest Hotel Reviews Dead? (And Why Texture and Neurohaptics Are What Matter Now More Than Ever)

Are there any honest hotel critics left? As someone who’s been writing about hotels for 25 years, I mostly only see polished, AI-perfected, people-pleasing posts and gushing copy that give you nothing useful — or meaningful — these days. Nowhere tells you that the room you’re paying £350 a night for has all the charisma of an airport hotel (I mean, TripAdvisor might, but that’s not my vibe or tribe). And considerably less of the frisson of an airport lounge, because at least there you know something exciting lies ahead on the other side of those flight boards.

I’ve been nudged by many to start a newsletter for boutique-hotel and sustainable-luxury lovers. Then something forced my hand: I paid a significant sum to spend a long weekend somewhere that made me feel as though I’d wandered into a Dunelm installation (international readers, think Ikea without the Skandi sass). Truthfully, I’ve not been inside one of those mid-market meh homewares shops, but I’ve walked past enough to know it isn’t my vibe. What it also reminded me is: we need to talk more about texture.

Why neurohaptics?

If you’re a design-hotel devotee, you’ve probably come across the concept of neuroaesthetics by now — the science of how visual beauty genuinely tickles our neurochemistry. When we see something pleasing to the eye, it doesn’t merely spark a pleasurable thought: it registers physically, lifting mood, reducing cortisol, activating the brain’s reward pathways and happy hormones.

I’ve been increasingly convinced there’s a companion phenomenon for interiors — places that make us feel more, which we don’t yet have a name for, so I’m giving it one: neurohaptics.

Where neuroaesthetics is about what we see, neurohaptics is about what we feel — not just with our hands, but with the deeper, older, more animal parts of our brains that respond to texture, patina, weight, warmth, and the tangible truth of something genuinely human-made. The satisfying sensation of holding a handmade ceramic cup. The heft of a hand-woven native-cotton napkin. The if-walls-could-talk smell of an old homestead with peeling window frames that speak to decades of sunlight and woodsmoke, where generations-old oil paintings smile down on this random gathering of strangers. In seeking perfection, we’ve lost an appreciation for texture. If it’s too smooth and polished, a place doesn’t feel lived in or authentically linked to place and real people — texture brings that which Pinterest grids rarely represent, and a job-lot of online-ordered ‘curios’ will most likely kill.

Texture is my explanation for why certain scenes hit us somewhere deeper before we’ve consciously registered why we feel more present, more connected: it’s the sense that we’ve actually arrived. But it’s also about its intangible integrity and power to cultivate curiosity: maybe you wonder about the 16th-century coral bricks (Casa Carolina in Colombia), the wall of The Lab sustainability activity centre in the rainforest made from thousands of wine and drinks bottles at The Datai Langkawi, in Malaysia, above), or how many conversations happened over the stitching of that quirky patchwork quilt (Fogo Island Inn, header).

I can’t wait to signpost you to the hotels, restaurants, cafés, galleries, workshops where the hand-woven textiles, the calligraphied menus, the patina-rich wabi-sabi surfaces activate something neurological — something that the sea-of-sameness copied-from-an-Insta-post, designed-on-a-CAD, decked out in mass-produced mid-ness simply can’t ever touch.

The hotel that broke me with its blah

It was to be the first trip away with my daughter and my dad. Special-occasion, three-generation energy. But I walked into the purpose-built rectangular lounge, where everything was a shade of beige and box-fresh — what I call ‘shipping-container chic’ — and felt immediately sad that we were somewhere anything but special. My coffee came in a cup that simulated crackled ceramic. The table surface was a magnolia-painted wood. You could tell this hailed from a business plan pretending to be hospitality — serving a mainstream clientele content with unimaginative offerings, operated with all the confidence of something that has never once asked itself what special actually looks, feels, and tastes like.

I have been reviewing hotels for almost three decades. I stood in our could-be-anywhere hotel room, looked at the sticks in a pot (this is someone who once had a dedicated @sticksinapot account to commemorate the laziest versions of this blah-interiors staple) and felt, with some clarity, that I had made a mistake in not asking someone I trusted whether they knew this to be somewhere with soul. And that the mistake had cost me not just money, but the one thing you genuinely cannot get back: time with people I love, in a place that was not a welcome escape from our everyday. It could have been anywhere. It was anywhere.

My previous trip had been to Porto, staying at The Largo: I feel tingles on my spine just thinking about the granite-rock-face-and-waterfall touch-responsive art installation in the living-room lobby called the Foundation of The Largo (aka Rock Piece, pictured above). This is Porto’s genuine geology revealed in the kind of arts-meets-place way with a section of Victoria Hill actually used in a way that no amount of reclaimed wood and Edison bulbs can manufacture: this hotel had me viscerally feeling texture at every turn — Nuno Mendes’ menu in Cozinha das Flores, the architecture and design, the context. Soul. Character. Charm. The physical sensation of truly being somewhere else. And I was reminded, sharply, of how much I value the recommendations of people whose taste — and integrity — I actually trust, when I had been told this was a great place to stay. (I hope you can trust my list of favourite boutique-eco hotels: Bouteco Loves.)

Why this, why now

Folks have been asking me to share more about my favourite sustainability-sensitive places for years. I always hesitated — not from false modesty, but because I’m not gunning to earn commission on bigging up some hotels over others, and I didn’t want to add to the noise — I’ve watched too many ‘recommendations’ platforms quietly become promotions masquerading as reviews.

The noise has become so loud, so predictable — algorithms tuned to the risk-averse, vanilla preferences of Silicon Valley — that the opposite now has genuine value. Dorsia Travel has made me laugh with their refreshingly cutting reviews (check out his take on 50 Best), which boldly name and shame. There is something almost radical about recommending places you really want other people to visit to have their neurochemicals sparked for all the reasons, and not because your content is just part of a Faustian pact you’ve made in return for a press stay.

So here is Craving Texture. I’ll be celebrating spaces and places that invite you to rub up against it — occasionally, writing about the ones that lack it.

Welcome to texture worth travelling for.

xo Juliet

PS — You can join me vicariously on my travels through my Instagram.

PPS — Who the hell am I?

Born in Canada, first two years in Algeria, grew up in New York when it was still gritty, edgy and quirky. Separated parents had me yo-yoing all over, but I ended up in the UK, where I went on to study Social Anthropology, which in those days required a lot of explaining. (Why humans do what they do: my Dad said at the time it’d be useless; I feel like that’s mostly what I write about now.) I’d wanted to be a journalist since I was old enough to know what one was.

In the 1990s, I was a music journalist who spent every penny not on anything sensible but on VIP rooms and the original boutique hotels. Field research: I just didn’t know it yet. The pivot that changed everything happened in Ibiza — I was there with my friend James, who met the woman, Tamara, who’d become his wife, and in the meantime, they had an idea: a hotel guide for people like us. Would I write it? I created the voice for Mr & Mrs Smith and was passionate about taking it digital and into social media back when the internet was still the Wild West. Along the way, I also did things like write Louis Vuitton City Guides and present a travel show for the Discovery Channel: tough job, but someone had to actually do it. Back before AI could knock out content in the blink of an LLM-generated round-up.

In 2015, I felt a pull toward the hotels doing something harder than being beautiful. I founded Bouteco in 2016, became Condé Nast Traveller’s first Sustainability Editor in 2020, wrote The Green Edit: Travel (Penguin) and The Bucket List: Eco Experiences (Rizzoli), and co-presented The Climate Show on Sky News with George Monbiot — which, as it turns out, two people agreeing with each other does not make compelling television. Twenty-five years of hotel beds and an anthropologist’s compulsion to ask why does this place feel like this? have taught me that the most engaging conversation in travel has almost nothing to do with carbon offsets. It’s about soul and patina. And I’ve learned to lean in and talk about sustainability without talking about sustainability — which I hope I've done here…