Not every winter traveler is chasing chairlifts and crowded après bars. Some of us want a season of saying no. No to rental shops, no to group lessons, no to packing strategy meetings on the bed. The fantasy is simpler: wake up in a room you never want to leave, pad to a deep tub, order breakfast to the duvet, watch the weather through glass instead of through goggles.

The right hotel turns that instinct into a full program. It is not a base camp you abandon at 9 a.m. but the entire expedition. The suite becomes your living room, spa, and screening room in one. Downstairs, there is a restaurant you would cross town for if you lived here, a bar that doubles as a speakeasy for house guests only, therapists who know how to unkink a neck that has been hunched over a laptop since September. Maybe you stroll to a frozen lake or a quiet beach for an hour, then retreat to the fireplace you have mentally claimed as your own.

This list collects 10 properties that understand staying in as a legitimate winter sport. Some sit in deep Alpine snow, others in English parkland or Caribbean trade winds, but all are built for deliberate hibernation. Expect serious baths, serious bedding, and room service calibrated to long, lazy days. If you leave the property at all, it will be by choice, not necessity. The real trip happens between your room, the spa, the dining room, and the fire.

Guana has always attracted people who prefer a book, a breeze and a long lunch to any kind of scene. The privately owned 850-acre island holds just a handful of rooms and villas folded into a nature preserve of beaches, ridgelines, and forests dense with birdlife. Nearly five decades after the Jarecki family began restoring it as a low-key resort and sanctuary, the atmosphere is stubbornly, stubbornly  analog: no cars, no public access—just walking paths, tennis courts, a small spa cabin, and water that stays the color of mouthwash year-round. Winter is about doing less rather than more. Float off White Bay, retreat to a shaded terrace, order another rum drink or grilled fish, and let the staff quietly handle everything else.

Nearly a mile high on a 250-acre mountaintop at the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, this Relais & Châteaux hideout feels like someone took the idea of a cozy cabin and ran it through a very competent billionaire. Rooms and cabins come with serious kit: wood-burning fireplaces, steam showers, soaking tubs, some with private saunas and wide porches facing an ocean of ridgelines. You can spend entire days in a robe, rotating between tub, nap, and the library, drifting out only when the dinner bell and the smell of something slow-braised make resistance pointless. When cabin fever hits, you still never really “leave.” Trails lace straight off the property for short rambles, there is a hot tub and sauna for thawing out, and staff can organize everything from guided hikes in falling snow to low-effort lawn games when it melts. Dinner, poured drinks and mountain silence pull you back inside.

The Chedi Andermatt is hard to beat for a grown-up winter escape. You arrive from Zurich or Milan in your travel clothes, and within an hour, you are padding across heated stone floors, cocktail in hand, trying to decide whether to unpack or pretend you live........

© Observer