Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards

Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards have honored three  properties with interior design concepts by the J. Banks Design Group: Castello di Casole, The Sebastian Vail and Montage Palmetto Bluff.

Best Hotels in Italy: No. 5, Castello di Casole

Top Hotels in Colorado: No. 5, The Sebastian-Vail

Top Resorts in the South: No. 7, Montage Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton

We at J. Banks Design feel gratified that our interiors for the Castello di Casole, The Sebastian Vail and the Montage Palmetto Bluff contribute to the experiences that make this lauded magazine’s readers choose these wonderful resorts.

Here is what Conde Nast Traveler says about how it decides who receives the Readers’ Choice awards, this narrative about the 2018 choices that span the globe:

Quiet. Small. Subdued. This is what travelers seem to be craving this year. How do we know? Well, once the surveys start pouring in—this year there were more than 429,000 of them—we become Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report,’ analyzing behaviors and locations, fitting together pieces of a puzzle until a full snapshot of where and how you travel emerges. This year it was all about comfort.

You stayed closer to home than ever before, pushing more cities like Chicago, Charleston, and now Nashville to the top of our lists. You favored the Caribbean—even Hawaii felt far—and islands like Hilton Head, Amelia, and Kiawah. The properties that impressed you most were smaller and less flashy than in years past (the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore was your favorite hotel in the U.S.), and our small-cruise-ship list is longer than it’s ever been, suggesting that the right kind of less *is* more.

It’s also been a year of self-care: Five spa resorts ranked higher than ever. The world has changed in ways no one could have predicted, and so it stands to reason that how we get away from it all would, too.