Rooms Hotel Tbilisi

Before Stamba, there was Rooms. Opened in 2012 in a converted publishing-house annexe in the Vera district, Rooms Hotel Tbilisi introduced the industrial-vintage warmth—herringbone parquet, worn leather, brass lamps, walls of books and photography—that has since become the city's signature style, and it remains the more intimate, more romantic of the Adjara Group's two neighbouring flagships.

Rooms are cocooning rather than cavernous: dark timber, moody lighting and marble-touched bathrooms, with the best opening onto the quiet garden courtyard. The public spaces are the heart of the operation—a lobby lounge that functions as the creative city's living room, and a restaurant whose New York-meets-Georgia menu, natural wine list and garden terrace keep it packed with locals as much as guests, which is always the tell of a good hotel kitchen.

Vera is an ideal base: leafy, faintly bohemian, ten minutes' walk from Rustaveli Avenue and a short taxi from the Old Town's sulphur baths. Guests share some facilities with Stamba next door, including its rooftop pool scene. Rooms trades scale and spectacle for warmth and confidence; for couples and returning Tbilisi visitors, it is many people's quiet favourite in the whole region.