Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby

Luxury is serious work. Giles Coren becomes a pool hand at Singapore's Marine Bay Sands.

Giles and Monica are flying high at Mashpi Lodge in the Andean Cloud Forest of Ecuador.

Welcome to Nairobi's Giraffe Manor, where giraffes, staff and guests coexist.

Perfection is the only standard at Royal Mansour, Marrakech's jewel in the crown.

Perched on top of zig-zagged stilts like the nearby fishermen’s houses, stands the remote Fogo Island Inn. Giles Coren and Monica Galetti meet the staff of this unique hotel in Newfoundland that pays homage to the European settlers that arrived from Ireland and Devon to fish cod here. They hope to revive the fortunes and folklore of their island home and forge a new future from its fishing past.

Giles Coren and Monica Galetti don their thermals and extreme weather gear, and trek 200km north of the Arctic Circle to Sweden’s Lapland, where they enter a magical world of snow, ice, inky-blue skies, and Icehotel. Before bedding down in freezing temperatures, there’s work to be done – rooms to be carved, drinking glasses to be hewn and the local delicacy of reindeer meat to be prepared.