Four Seasons Hotel Milan, Milan, Italy

The Four Seasons Milan regularly wins luxury hotel awards, and you can see why. As an architectural conversion, it is a triumph - a sensitive and clever refashioned15th-century monastery.

The location is surprising - down a quiet side street off the fashionable Monte Napoleone, ideal for fashionistas, many of whom mill about the low lobby clutching Prada bags. The tone, in typical Four Seasons style, is beige and marble, with the usual extravagant flower arrangements. The architect has retained the cloisters, but glassed them in, with a/c units disguised in wall mounted walnut veneered consoles.

The facilities

In the centre of the luxury hotel is a lovely, small, sunken garden area, around which are arranged a number of underground restaurants, cleverly lit with natural light from a central light well.There is no pool at the luxury hotel, but a gym and fitness centre, as well as extensive business and meeting facilities. The overall tone of Four Seasons Milan is discreet - not as heavenly perhaps, despite the cloisters, as the George V in Paris, with none of the same excitement, but cool, restrained and sophisticated.

The rooms

Upstairs, via a mosaic-floored elevator, most of the 118 rooms are large and very light, most with two windows, and the deluxes face the central garden. Hallways at the luxury hotel are cream and pale yellow, with pale wood and Fortuny fabrics, and darker 'pear and sycamore' headboards and furniture. The standard shape is long and rectangular, sofas at one end, the bed at the other, a desk in the middle between the two windows. Superiors are as large, though not always quite as light.