Atemporal

Neuroaesthetics: have you heard of this science that explains our cognitive appreciation of beauty? It’s linked to my measure of whether a hotel is special. We travel for different reasons: my driver is without doubt curiosity — the thrill of somewhere new, and savouring it through every sense: smell, touch, taste, and of course what you see: an appreciation of the timbre of a place that lifts you out of your everyday life back home. A chance to meet new people, experience new landscapes, flavours and cultures. Spoiler alert: Atemporal nails it for your neuroaesthetics.

Arriving at what looks, at first glance, like a Victorian Gothic revival mansion in a residential quarter of Lima, I would have struggled to place myself in the world — but for the red and white Peruvian flag subtly fluttering above its crenellated roofline. The casa is, in fact, a 1940s Peruvian mansion built in what some call a Tudor style — but for this Londoner, less in Henry VIII terms, more Tudor in the way Acton’s Hanger Hill Garden Estate is, here in the district of Miraflores.

After we ring the doorbell by the gate, the heavy wooden front door swings open onto a glow of low-lit rooms filled with antiques and curios. A designer friend once told me that a door handle is a building's handshake — it sets the tone before a word is spoken. This one offered a warm, firm, confident grip, and welcomed me into my favourite kind of stay…

There is no corporate lobby, only a small bureau and a welcoming host who takes your details and hands over old-fashioned keys, then walks you through the salon — a vintage black telephone balanced on a stack of art books, an oversized glass vase spilling over with dramatic greenery — and out into a covered sitting room that opens onto the garden, birdsong drifting down from somewhere above. The fronds and leaves of evergreens, elephant ear, conifers and ferns frame every angle; a ginger cat watches from the branch of an old tree in the corner. A drink arrives in cut crystal, poured in a corner pantry stocked like a well-kept larder.

There are only six rooms, so it feels — briefly, deliciously — as though the whole house belongs to you alone. The casa was designed by the team behind Titilaka, Cirqa and Hotel B, in the spirit of a casona limeña — one of Lima's grand old townhouses. The coffee table is stacked with photography books that hint at the astonishing range of landscapes Peru holds, from desert coast to Altiplano.

In the corner, a small kitchen tempts with a help-yourself larder of teas and coffees, and a shelf of glass jars hand-labelled for nuts, seeds and snacks. Nothing here feels mass-produced or commercial; you would be hard-pressed to date which era you are in. It’s just somewhere extremely elegant.

My sage-walled room is furnished with antiques and chic quirky fittings. A small vase holds voluptuous white roses on a silver tray; a single petal falls as I write, which feels suitably poetic.

If neuroaesthetics is informed by what we see, where beauty is not decoration, but it actually informs how we feel, the way to my heart is through my brain. It has become something of a cliché in travel writing to say a hotel feels like the home of a friend with impeccable taste and unstinting generosity. Here, the cliché simply happens to be true. The effect is also to make you a better guest: more human, more alive to exchanges, more present.

Set that against the anonymity of a big chain hotel, where you might be anywhere, and you understand the difference between visiting a city and never quite arriving in it. Paused here in the garden in Miraflores, writing these notes longhand in an old notebook, I feel my senses catch up with the present, and with this place I am visiting.

Keen to explore what Limeños call 'the Grey City' (its seaside cloudiness only adds to its mystique) — home to almost 12 million of the country's 35 million people — we walk towards the neighbouring district of San Isidro. Passing a mid-century church, Parroquia Santa María Reina, in a city with a lot of Japanese influence, I’m reminded of the term busu-kawaii — translating literally as 'ugly-cute'. Brutalist modernism designed by the architect Humberto Guerra Vega, its concrete heaviness speaking more of industry than of worship. 

Limeños are religious too, about what and where they eat. A chef friend, Bettina Campolucci Bordi, has sent me to Ccori (Quechua for ‘gold’), where the tasting menu at the chef's counter surprises and delights every bit as much as my hotel. I had not expected the first course to be frozen ants, plucked out with tweezers while the science was explained over every spoonful. Ccori has a non-profit arm founded by chef Palmiro Ocampo Grey, with the mission of raising awareness around food sustainability and food security through its Cocina Óptima concept: ‘optimised cooking’, maximum flavour, zero waste.

Sated after our extended late lunch, there is nowhere I would rather be than back in Atemporal's open-air lounge, grazing on the wine and cheeses laid out in the corner pantry. This is a true boutique hotel that makes old-fashioned pastimes — reading a book by lamplight, doing absolutely nothing — feel like the height of luxury. It is winter here while it is summer at home for me, and I am happy to give the coastline a miss in favour of staying snug. We race around too often, ticking off lists. Here, in this Miraflores hideaway, you want to slow down and taste your surroundings. This is my favourite kind of hotel: one that reads like a storybook. As the saying goes, if life is a book, those who do not travel read only one page. Pause here, and you will feel as though you have read many chapters. A couple of nights in the capital was the perfect novella as part of our epic South American journey.