How we choose

Three writers and one photographer, working from four cities and no office, keeping one list since 2019.

What gets in

A hotel gets into this guide when the building explains the hotel. That is the whole test. If you can move the same rooms and the same service into another structure without losing anything, the hotel is not for us. The four sections exist because four kinds of building kept coming back: houses built around art, cells built around a single night of sleep, halls rebuilt from snow every winter, and large Canadian complexes that occupy buildings worth describing. Twenty is a working number, not a ranking, and the order is the order of the list.

Where the material comes from

We read published material: hotel and operator websites, architectural and design press, museum and municipal records, and the documentation architects publish about their own projects. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and nothing on this site should be read as a report from a room. Each entry carries the month it was last read through, so you can see how old the description is. When a hotel changes hands, renames itself or rebuilds, the entry is rewritten rather than patched, and the month changes with it.

What we do not publish

No prices, no star classifications, no scores, no ranked lists. No booking, no availability, no affiliate links, and no paid placements of any kind. We do not accept hosted stays, and we do not sell entries into the guide. There is nothing on this site that earns money when you click it, which is why there is no reason for us to describe a hotel as anything other than what it is.

Why four of the twenty are casino hotels

Four Canadian hotels in this guide have gaming floors. They are here because their buildings hold up: pavilions from a world exposition on an island in the St Lawrence, a resort cut into the escarpment above a waterfall, a riverside complex with its own marina, and a lakeside resort on First Nation land. We describe the architecture, the rooms, the restaurants, the theatre and the view. The gaming floor itself is not described and not assessed anywhere on this site, and we link to no operator.