For quiet
Palazzo Radomiri
Dobrota, Bay of Kotor · Montenegro
A restored sea captain's house on the Dobrota waterfront, where the Bay of Kotor comes close enough to touch from the jetty and the mountains climb straight out of the water.
Dobrota is the quiet stretch of the Boka, a ribbon of old stone palaces and little jetties north of Kotor's walls, built long ago by the shipowners and captains who made their money on the water. Palazzo Radomiri is one of those houses, a late-17th-century mansion from the Venetian years that a local family brought back to life in 2007 as what it calls Montenegro's first heritage boutique hotel. The bones are honest: exposed stone walls, wooden beams, travertine floors, antique pieces chosen room by room rather than bought by the crate. There are ten rooms, each named after a boat, each looking out either at the bay or over the courtyard with its small pool. From most windows the view is the same and never tires, still green water, a cruise ship threading the narrows, the grey wall of the mountains behind.
Meals are served in the house and on the terrace, and the kitchen keeps things close to home, produce from the bay and the hills around it, cooked simply by a chef given room to have ideas. It is not a destination restaurant and does not pretend to be. What it does well is the long, unhurried meal by the water, which in Dobrota is rather the point.
The Bay of Kotor fills up in August, and the walled town fills faster still with day trippers off the ships. Radomiri sits apart from all that, ten minutes up the shore, with a jetty on the water and a pool in the courtyard to come back to. It is a four-star by its own reckoning, not a grand hotel, and we like it the more for knowing exactly what it is. For the Boka at its calmest, this is where we would stay.
