Australia

The east coast carries two of the country's defining point breaks. Byron Bay sits on the easternmost point of the continent — a headland catching swell from three directions, with The Pass, one of the longest right-handers in Australia, wrapping beneath the lighthouse. The surfers arrived in the 1960s, the artists in the 70s, the yogis in the 80s, and the development code has kept the town low-rise through all of it. Noosa, forty-five minutes north of Brisbane, runs its points — First Point, Tea Tree, Granite — through a headland that is a National Park and a World Surfing Reserve simultaneously, with one of the most serious restaurant streets in Australia two hundred metres away. Autumn, March through June, is when both fire.

Margaret River is the other Australia entirely: two hours south of Perth — already the most isolated city on earth — with seventy-five breaks along 130 kilometres of Indian Ocean coast. Surfers Point and The Box hold the Margaret River Pro, a WSL Championship Tour stop, every year. These are not beginner waves, and the cold Southern Ocean groundswells that run April through October are why the region has been turning out professional surfers for fifty years. Twenty kilometres inland, the wine region takes itself just as seriously. The hotels in this collection span both coasts and all three temperaments.