The Aim-High Hotels You Must Book in 2025
Skyline Lodge | Tim Lenz
For Wildsam's inaugural Road Trip Awards we asked a panel of seven expert judges for the places that will make your next voyage through America unforgettable. Here, we're taking a look at Aim-High Hotels, places with exceptional landscapes, bespoke architecture and savvy culture. Bonus points for killer martinis at the bar.
Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn
What happens when you mix English countryside charms, rugged Norwegian ingenuity and a Coastal California coziness? Deetjen’s is what happens. A property that claims a rambling family of rooms and cabins, all hand-built with reclaimed redwood lumbers and lore, with no TVs, no phones. Those trappings of the modern hustle are replaced, here, with wood-burning stoves, decades-old guest journals, peaceful forest views and the fi nest breakfast on Highway 1.
—Taylor Bruce, Editor in Chief
Hermosa Inn
Cowboy painter Lon Megargee planted the seed for this cactus blossom, a desert resort in the hacienda tradition. A Garden Casita would be our pick, if you’re asking.
The Pelican Inn
Sway in a rope hammock on the porch of a salt marsh sanctuary. Wake up to warm biscuits at breakfast, then row out a crab trap on the private beach.
Tourists
A welter of pitch-perfect shelters anchor a cultural retreat in the Berkshires. The inspiration is road-trippy, the style’s mod-timeless, the ethos all full-hearted fun. Best live music of any hotel?
INNESS
Stay in the Farmhouse or in a Cabin (capital-C), ensconced in exacting design, surrounded by 200-plus woodsy Catskills wonder shaped by a renowned landscape architect. Founded by Taavo Somer, creator of a slew of high-design NYC and Upstate favorites, this place threads the needle of luxe and rustic like few others.
Primland
A retro-palatial lodge presides over vast Blue Ridge acres and many experiences of refined outdoors pursuit—including one of the Commonwealth’s finest golf courses.
Willow House
You won’t forget this one. A dozen modernist cube-casitas command sweeping vistas of the Chisos Mountains in the mysteriously spiritual light and space of far West Texas.
Skyline Lodge
A student of Frank Lloyd Wright designed this 1929 mountaintop retreat, cladding it in robust stone and wood. A 2021 makeover elevated everything without touching the fresh-air spirit.
Devil’s Thumb Ranch
Plenty to say about this Western refuge 8,400 feet up in the Colorado Rockies—it’s got some of the best Nordic skiing in North America, for one. The main lodge is a cowboy’s vision.
The Road Trips Awards
We scoured the map. We asked our smartest, most well-traveled friends. The results are in.
