Sleeping at the End of the Horizon

We looked for places where the view outside the room almost stops being a view and becomes a horizon — not necessarily the most remote or the most expensive.

The four icons in this article — Awasi Patagonia, Pater Noster, Southern Ocean Lodge and Saffire Freycinet — are not currently bookable through SherryStay. Beside each one is a nearby place that is.

Pater Noster occupies the lighthouse keepers' house on Hamneskär, a 20-minute boat ride from Marstrand, with just nine rooms.

Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island burned in the 2020 fires, was rebuilt and reopened in December 2023.

Hostería Pehoé sits on a small island in Lake Pehoé in Torres del Paine, joined to the shore by a narrow footbridge.

Before booking a place like this, check the journey first: ferries, boats and regional flights may be seasonal or weather-dependent.

Southern Chile holds one of the most beautiful expressions of this idea. Awasi Patagonia sits in a private reserve of some 15,000 acres, looking out on the Torres del Paine range and Lake Sarmiento.

The lodge is made of independent villas — thirteen standard villas and one master villa — raised on stilts and scattered across the land so that they never feel like a hotel complex. Each villa has its own outdoor hot tub.

Here you don't open a curtain to see a skyline. You see Patagonian steppe, a lake and the jagged peaks of Torres del Paine. The wind is part of the experience, the clouds move fast and the light changes through the day. What lies beyond the horizon? More Patagonia. Which is exactly the point.

The lodge offers guests private transfers from Puerto Natales and from the Cerro Castillo border crossing. It is the kind of place I would not go to for a single night — the road is part of the journey.

Awasi is not currently bookable through SherryStay. What you can book with us is Hostería Pehoé, inside the park itself — and it has a story of its own. It sits on a small island of about five hectares in the middle of Lake Pehoé, joined to the shore by a narrow footbridge, facing the Cuernos del Paine. If you have ever seen a photograph of Torres del Paine with a small building on an island and the mountains behind it, you have probably seen Pehoé.

Much further north is Hamneskär, a small dot in the outer archipelago of Sweden's west coast. On it stands the Pater Noster lighthouse, built in 1868.

The house where the lighthouse keepers once lived is now an exceptional boutique hotel, and they call it A Home on the Horizon themselves. That is not copy we invented for this article — it is the name the place gives itself.

It has just nine rooms, and never more than 22 guests at a time. The stay includes transport, food and activities. Around it are the rocks, the lighthouse and the sea.

It is one of those rare places where the journey itself explains why you came: you have to cross the sea, on a boat ride of about 20 minutes from Marstrand. Then you reach a small island where the sea is not a side view. It is all there is.

Pater Noster is not currently bookable through SherryStay. What you can book is Marstrands Havshotell, on the island of Marstrand itself — the departure point for the boat to the lighthouse. If you want a night before the crossing or after it, this is where you leave from.

Kangaroo Island lies off the coast of South Australia, and on its south coast stands Southern Ocean Lodge, on the clifftops between Flinders Chase National Park and Seal Bay Conservation Park.

It was designed so that the Southern Ocean is almost always in front of you. The Great Room is wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows, and the 25 suites stretch along the coastline.

And the place has a story the photographs don't show: the lodge was destroyed in the 2020 bushfires, rebuilt over four years, and reopened in December 2023.

There is no promenade in front of it, no skyscrapers across the bay and no city glittering at night. On a stormy day the ocean looks almost violent; on a calm day it becomes an immense blue line.

Southern Ocean Lodge is not currently bookable through SherryStay. What you can book with us on the island is Seafront Hotel Kangaroo Island. To be precise: it is not the same experience. It is not on the south-coast cliffs, and it is a comfortable base from which to explore the island — including the drive to that wild coast.

In the Faroe Islands you don't need a luxury hotel to feel you have reached the edge. Sometimes what you need is a small house, a window, and a village where the road simply stops.

The islands lie in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, and their landscape looks as if someone cut the mountains with a knife and set them down in the sea.

To really experience the horizon, head away from Tórshavn — out to the villages and the outer islands. There you can sleep facing cliffs that rise straight out of the ocean, and discover that 'Sea View' can be an almost insulting description. Because it isn't a view of the sea. It is living, for a moment, in front of the North Atlantic.

On Tasmania's east coast is the Freycinet Peninsula: bays, granite, forest and ocean.

Saffire Freycinet has 20 suites, and every one was individually designed to maximise privacy and capture its own aspect of the Hazards Mountains and Great Oyster Bay.

This is a different kind of end of the horizon. Not total emptiness, but layers: bed, glass, water, mountains, sky — and the eye keeps looking for what lies beyond all of them.

Saffire is not currently bookable through SherryStay. What you can book with us in Coles Bay is The Loft — and here the alternative delivers exactly what we were looking for: in the property's own photograph, the Hazards and the bay are visible through the bedroom window.

We tend to assume an endless horizon needs an ocean. Not necessarily. There are deserts where the effect is even stronger: instead of water there is earth, instead of waves there are dunes, and the most astonishing thing is the silence.

In Namibia, for example, you can sleep at lodges set in expanses where the eye travels for kilometres without meeting almost any human structure. By day the horizon is brown, red and gold. At sunset the boundaries dissolve.

And at night comes something we almost never experience in cities: real darkness. Not the darkness of a room with curtains, but the darkness of a place with almost no other source of light. Suddenly you understand that the end of the horizon is not only something you see. Sometimes it is something you don't.

There are also nights with no horizon at all. In Arctic Norway, where sea, snow and sky meet, the line between them can be almost completely erased.

In winter comes the Arctic darkness; in summer come the weeks when the sun barely sets. The hotel here is not just a place to sleep. It is a vantage point on something that our brains, used to morning, noon, evening and night, are not really built for.

In practical terms, some of these places are rather inconvenient. You have to fly far, drive for hours, sometimes take a boat. The weather changes, there is no mall nearby, and sometimes there is nothing to do after dinner.

Perhaps that is why we go. Most of our lives happen inside frames: walls, streets, screens, schedules, notifications.

Then you reach a room with a big window, and behind it there is almost nothing. And suddenly the eye can travel further than we can.

This may be the one mistake I would not make. If it took you a whole day to get there, don't leave the next morning.

These places work slowly. On the first evening you are still taking photos. On the first morning you are still checking your phone. Then comes the second day: you have seen the view, photographed it, and you no longer need to prove to anyone that you are there.

And then you simply start to look. Maybe that is the reason to go all the way to the end of the horizon — not to find what lies beyond it, but to reach a place where, at least for a few days, there is no need to go anywhere else.

When booking a place like this, check something we usually treat as a small detail: which way the room faces. The same hotel can give two completely different experiences.

Check whether the view is full or partial, whether you can see it from the bed or only from the balcony, whether there are buildings in front of the room, what time the sun reaches that side, and whether there is light pollution nearby.

Because when you travel to the end of the horizon, the view is not an extra on the room. It is the reason to book it.

In remote places, check the journey in advance, not just the hotel. Ferries, boats, mountain roads and regional flights may be seasonal or weather-dependent. In some destinations meals, transfers and activities also need to be booked ahead.

And not every place that photographs like the end of the world is actually remote, just as not every remote place feels like the end of the world. We are looking for the rare meeting of the two: a place where the road ends, the hotel begins, and beyond the window there remains only the thin line we see all our lives and never reach. The horizon.