Truly memorable hotel design isn’t just about seamless check-ins, good sheets, and moody lighting (though we’ll happily take them all). It’s about spaces that linger in your brain long after you’ve hopped on your return flight. Now that summer is in full swing, we’ve found three new spots that hit that sweet spot — a chef-owned escape in the French countryside, a five-star retreat on the Cap d’Antibes waterfront, and a bold newcomer in Houston, steps away from the Museum District.

When the Ace Hotel opened in Manhattan in 2009, it established a blueprint for the idea of a hotel lobby as a living room for the city. With its Stumptown Coffee, Opening Ceremony outpost, April Bloomfield-helmed restaurant, rows of laptop-friendly desks (in an era before WeWork, no less), vintage-inspired photo booth, and a bustling events calendar, the Ace was as much a hangout for locals as it was a haven for travelers. Ace continued to imprint this model as it opened in cities around the world, and other hotels soon followed suit. As this mode of hospitality became the norm over the past decade and a half, though, it's gotten harder for new hotels to stand out, which is why design has become such an important distinguishing factor. But as I found in my travels over the last six months, there are a few properties who are really doing things right — who have taken the idea of the hotel as living room, tweaking it through both expansion and refinement, to something resembling perfect: the Stockholm Stadshotell and the Ace Hotel Kyoto.