Sofitel Luxembourg Le Grand Ducal

Class: Deluxe

Style: Modern design

Rooms: 130

We’d be willing to bet that when you imagine five-star luxury hotel in the heart of Luxembourg City, the chances of your coming up with something that looks like the Sofitel Luxembourg Le Grand Ducal are slim indeed. Though Luxembourg is not exactly well known as a hotbed of modern interior architecture, this is the kind of hotel that goes a long way towards changing the public’s perception of a place.

This is a chain that knows what they’re doing, taking the most agreeable elements of corporate hospitality—the consistency, the service—and marrying them with a visual sensibility that’s always at very least slightly ahead of the curve. Here at the Grand Ducal they’ve gone several steps further into the future. Rooms are anything but conservative: colors are vivid, furniture rakishly modern, yet the comforts, underneath it all, are the equal of any city-center luxury hotel.

And the public spaces are no less distinctive. The Grand Ducal trades dainty salon style for a striking, graphic look, especially in the Coco Mango bar, where the bold and distinctly Asian look threatens to overwhelm the panoramic rooftop views. Admit it: egg-shaped chairs and acres of pink neon are nobody’s idea of a Luxembourg stereotype.