Hotel Schlössle

Hotel Schlössle gathers a cluster of thirteenth-to-sixteenth-century merchant buildings on Pühavaimu street, deep inside Tallinn's UNESCO-listed old town, and turns them into the Baltic capital's most romantic small hotel. The public rooms set the tone immediately—massive timber beams, rough stone walls, a fire burning in the vaulted lounge—and the whole property trades in the kind of candlelit medieval atmosphere that Tallinn does better than almost any city in Europe.

Rooms are individually shaped by the old structures, with antique furniture, heavy fabrics and modern bathrooms worked in around the beams; suites add four-posters and sitting areas under the eaves. The scale stays intimate, and service has the assured, discreet warmth of a long-established family of hotels—Schlössle is the flagship of the group that also runs the St. Petersbourg nearby.

Breakfast and dinner are served in the stone cellar restaurant, and the location could not be more central: Town Hall Square, the passages of Katariina käik and Toompea hill are all within a few hundred metres. There is no spa and no view to speak of—the hotel itself is the view. For a winter weekend especially, with snow on the gables outside, few northern European stays are as transporting.