Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel opened in 1887 as a summer retreat for the railway and steamship age, and it still operates to that seasonal rhythm, closing each winter and reawakening in spring. Its colossal white colonnade — the hotel claims the world's longest front porch at some 660 feet — looks over the Straits of Mackinac from an island where motor vehicles have been banned since the nineteenth century. Arrival is by ferry, luggage moves by dray, and guests travel by horse-drawn carriage or bicycle, which keeps the entire island suspended in an earlier America.

Inside, interiors by Carleton Varney carry the same saturated-colour exuberance as his mentor Dorothy Draper's work, and no two of the hundreds of rooms are decorated alike; named suites honour former First Ladies. Traditions structure the day — a formal dinner with evening dress code, demitasse and dancing to the orchestra, afternoon tea in the parlour — and the famous porch rocking chairs fill each afternoon with lake-gazers.

Beyond the hotel lie its Jewel golf course, the fort and fudge shops of the island's small town, and quiet cycling loops around the shoreline. This is unabashedly nostalgic hospitality, wholesome, dressy and sociable, and it prices accordingly in high summer. Few places on the continent deliver so complete an escape from the twenty-first century.