House of Birds — Alentejo, Portugal

With very little fanfare, the artist Marisa Osorio-Farinha has parlayed her refined creativity – seen to best effect during her 15-year embroidery collaboration with Hermès – into the hotel business.The four-bedroom House of Birds, the first salvo of her Alentejo Villas by Siècle brand, hides behind a relatively inconspicuous white ochre and granite house in the old Portuguese town of Crato, the 13th- and 15th-century HQ of the Order of Hospitaliers and the Order of Malta.