Lopud 1483

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza spent the better part of two decades bringing the ruin back, and the care shows in the restraint. Original sixteenth-century plaster was kept, graffiti and all, the thirteen monks' cells reworked into five suites, the fortifications and the church left to speak for themselves. Old Master paintings hang beside work from the TBA21 collection, the beds and low chairs are Paola Lenti, and none of it fights the stone. Below the cloister a walled garden runs to medicinal herbs and lavender, a hammam is cut into the lower floor, and the ground falls away to a private beach and the clear water of the Elaphiti channel. The whole place goes to one party at a time, which is the point of the quiet.

The table

There is no restaurant in the ordinary sense, and no menu waiting on a stand. A chef cooks for whoever has taken the monastery, off the garden and the day's catch, and you eat where it suits: the long refectory table under a painting, the cloister in the evening, a terrace on the walls with the sea going dark below. Dalmatia gives it the raw material, and the setting does the rest. Tell them in advance what you want and they build the week around it.

Why it's in VANE

Croatia's coast is busy now, and Dubrovnik in July is no one's idea of quiet. Lopud 1483 is the way around that, a car-free island twenty minutes offshore, a monastery you have entirely to yourselves, art you would queue for on the mainland hung where you take breakfast. We would come for the building alone. Be clear on what it is, though. You cannot book a single room here; the whole place goes for exclusive use, which puts it in the celebration-and-gathering bracket rather than the weekend-away one. Come with the people you would fill it with, give it several days, and let the island do its work.