The Roxbury

Class: Comfort

Style: Bohemian

Rooms: 18

When we were young the Catskills were where our grandparents vacationed. But now, with flying growing more dehumanizing by the year, car-trip holidays are back in style. And it can’t be a coincidence that hip country hotels like the Roxbury are opening in unlikely places — this one in the town of the same name, just under three hours from New York City, a few miles to the north and west of the famous town of Woodstock. The Roxbury breaks the mold a bit — the colonial house might put you in mind of a bed and breakfast, and the adjoining motel building is a low-profile pre-modernist classic. Rooms, however, are anything but traditional, with design themes that range from the vibrant and contemporary to the flamboyantly retro. The idea here, clearly, is not minimalism but a sort of maximalism, throwing the usual boutique clichés out the window. At the same time, the Roxbury honors the boutique-hotel conventions that really matter. Bathrooms are stocked with top-shelf bath products and Egyptian cotton towels, and the bedrooms come with flat-screen televisions and DVD players standard. And no country escape these days is complete without a spa, in this case a need that’s more than adequately fulfilled by The Shimmer Spa. It’s a perfect country bolthole for a weekend in, or a base for exploring the outdoors of upstate New York — one thing it’s not is a traditional old-style Catskills resort.