There is a version of travel writing that has become background noise. You know it when you see it: the “Top 10” list, the algorithm-chasing headline, the review that could describe any hotel in any country with the nouns swapped out. It moves fast, says little, and is forgotten before the page finishes loading.
Travelicious is not that.
What this is
Travelicious is a slow look at extraordinary places — the hotels, restaurants, rooftops, gardens, museums, and buildings where design and atmosphere become inseparable. Each story is built around what makes a place genuinely distinct, examined the way an architect or a curator might examine it: what it borrows from history, what it dares to do differently, what argument it’s quietly making about how a space should feel.
Some of these places will be grand palaces reimagined for the present. Others will be the work of architects who’ve spent careers redefining what a building can be — I’ll be writing about projects by figures like Frank Gehry and Ricardo Bofill, and about landmark art museums including the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Miró Museum in Barcelona, and the Vasarely Museum in Aix-en-Provence, alongside the equally serious, if less famous, hands behind boutique properties in Rajasthan, Bangkok, Bali, and Santorini, just to mention a few locales as I work my way around the globe.. Some stories will be a single place; others — a city’s most distinctive rooftop bars, say — might bring a few together around one idea. What they’ll never do is flatten into a ranked list. Each place earns its story because of what makes it genuinely different, not because it filled a slot on a countdown.
The common thread isn’t fame or price point. It’s design intelligence — the sense that someone thought hard about every decision, and that the result rewards a reader’s attention the same way it rewards a visitor’s.
Every story is paired with photography I shot specifically for that piece — not stock images, not press-kit handouts, but original work made by me on location, in the light that place actually keeps. I draw from experience gained over decades across 110 countries and counting, with more than a hundred thousand published images worldwide.
What this isn’t
This isn’t a listicle — never a top ten of anything.
This isn’t paid promotion. Some of the places I write about will have hosted my visit, but what it doesn’t change is the judgment: I write about places because they’re genuinely worth the attention. I’m a trained architect, and if a place or property doesn’t hold up to close design scrutiny, it won’t appear here.
And my articles are not going behind a paywall. Every essay on Travelicious is, and will remain, free. I’m not interested in gatekeeping a view of the world — I’m interested in building an audience of people who care about the same things I do: architecture, atmosphere, and the particular pleasure of a place that was clearly made with intention.
Why subscribe
If you subscribe, new stories will land in your inbox as they’re written — no algorithm deciding whether you see them, no scrolling required. Given how much of this work depends on travel, access, and the kind of long, unhurried looking that doesn’t happen on a deadline, stories won’t arrive on a fixed schedule. But they will arrive, and they’ll always be free.
This opening post is the first entry — not a place, but a starting point. The first full story, on a palace hotel in Udaipur that refuses to choose between two centuries of design, is next.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
— Glen Allison