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Having not quite weathered the economic tumble, the St John Hotel was snapped up by Singapore hotelier Peng Loh's Unlisted Collection--and is now newly unveiled as the rather elegantly marquee'd One Leicester Street (yes, that's the address). Michelin-starred St John chef Tom Harris remains, but virtually the entirety of the place has been jazzed with a striking new aesthetic identity. Drawing on the sort of minimalist but warmly inviting sexiness of Shanghai sister hotel The Waterhouse, it's all muted greys, oak parquet flooring, copper pendant lamps, and lots of white, and white, and more white.

Decisively ramping up the revitalization of the previously downtrodden King's Cross area (once immortalized in song by the Pet Shop Boys with the rather mournful lyrical characterization, "Dead and wounded on either side"), the reopening of the storied Great Northern Hotel is the result of a £40 million renovation program undertaken by developer Jeremy Robson. A classic marker of the grand 19th Century transport boom, it was actually London's first (1854) railway lodging. Now Archer Humphryes Architects have given it a painstakingly sympathetic 21 Century makeover. And to be sure, little expense was spared returning the Great Northern Hotel to its glory days, in careful collaboration with English Heritage. 

Shanghai continues apace as a center of unabated urban expansion with the opening of the glamorous new Mandarin Oriental Pudong. And as an unapologetic acknowledgment of China's place as the universe's most insatiable contemporary art market, the hotel's 4000 strong (would we kid you?) art collection, as curated by the renowned Art Front Gallery, might inspire a few "gallery-with-rooms" observations. But this is a Mandarin Oriental, after all, so for those with sufficient dosh, its hospitality credentials are pretty much unassailable.

Ta-ta, Tahiti. Bite me, Bora Bora. See ya later, Santorini. The best island in the world is Boracay in the Philippines. There's no point in arguing this fact. The well-traveled editors of Travel & Leisure magazine officially named Boracay the bomb last year, so you need to get there as fast as you can. And once you're there, you'll need a place to sleep. Someplace as lovely as the island itself. Lucky for you, that's all sorted as well, as Aqua Boracay by yoo will soon its doors on the island, welcoming travelers to an environment of luxury, leisure, and probably some really fancy coffee. It's the stuff of Monday morning daydreams, so check out some of its more screensaver-worthy features and start making plans.

Europe, owing to its historical span, has a glorious way with the converted-religious-house-as-hotel (see Maastricht's spectacular Kruisherenhotel). But visitors to New York will soon have a similar spiritually-imbued sanctuary. MCR Development and The Brodsky Organization's new High Line Hotel is built right into the cloistered community that was first opened in 1895 to house students of the General Theological Seminary. Beyond all else, the neo-gothic edifice is a genuinely striking anomaly in this architectural jumble of a city, more akin to Oxford, or Flemish Belgium.

As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once so pithily observed, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” And if it's spring, can jaunts to Saint-Tropez be soon due? Just in time, the Cote D'Azur's heated hotel wars just got a little hotter with the remake of the 1930's classic Hotel de Paris. As a member of the Preferred Hotel Group, standards will be high across the board--but style takes center stage. Sybille de Margerie's design exhibits a sort of retro-sixties cool, with Jacobsen chairs, original sculptural elements, and a rather prodigious metallic chandelier. It's sexily modern, yet infused with a genuine Mediterranean warmth.

When Ford asked me to test out the new 2013 Explorer Sport, I knew my home base of New York City couldn’t offer the driving conditions it was built for. Sure, I’d hit plenty of potholes and swerve to avoid taxis cutting across four lanes of Broadway, but an Explorer seems to long for more natural extremes, like snow, ice, and treacherous mountain passes. The Explorer Sport attempts to solidify its position in the crossover SUV category—compared to the pickup truck-based platforms of previous generations—and almost seemed to challenge me to exploit the multiple personalities it embraces, from fun and sporty, to practical and comfortable, to capable and confident. Challenge accepted.

Oh this is good: the government of Iceland, which we can perhaps say is on thin ice where the economy is concerned, has no idea what to make of a Chinese businessman with ambitious designs—running hundreds of millions of dollars—to build a giant luxury hotel and “eco golf course” in what is essentially a barren waste of snow on the other side of the country from Reykjavik.