The Postcard Inn is a hip and lively budget hangout for surfers with style.

St. Pete beach: even the name smacks of a chilled-out biblical dude. At the Postcard Inn in Florida, near Tampa, the vibe is budget boho, 196 rooms in a revamped Travelodge with a huge pool at a price that allows you to fill your suitcase with new bathing suits, or save up for a new surfboard.

Decor is retro surfer, with wave-themed murals and photographs by local artists. Splashes of blue and green hues are provided by cushions and chairs in retro 1950s turquoise. Doors are also painted in the same vibrant seaside shade. Not only was the building itself upcycled (the original plan was to demolish the old motel and build a new one), reducing waste and removing the need for new building materials, it is also furnished with many vintage finds.

These surfers aren’t hippy layabouts: guest rooms have flat-screen TVs and free WIFI, as well as reconditioned surf gear.

For the full beach vibe, get a poolside cabana or beach bungalow, complete with a hammock in a private mini-yard. Be dazzled by on-trend canary-yellow loungers around the Junior Olympic-sized pool surrounded by palm trees.

Food has an accent on fun rather than haute cuisine with a BBQ and burger restaurant serving seafood as well as meatier dishes (the baby back ribs come highly recommended by the New York Times; the inn’s founder was New York restaurateur Stephen Hanson); and an all-day beachfront snack shack for a hot-breakfast carb dose after your early morning surf session. Quench your sea-salt-thirst with a Cold Ass beer or Frozen Tampa Tea (bourbon, peach tea and lemon). The dress code, obviously, is informal: flip flops, beach cover-ups and a skimpy pair of cut-offs.

Rates from $79 excluding tax, but including a 24-hour gym, to keep those surf muscles toned up night and day.

Photos: Postcard Inn, Hotel Chatter, the Coolist

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: The Postcard Inn, Florida appeared first on EcoSalon.

Willows Inn offers the freshest seafood imaginable…from right outside the door.

Organic dining from a chef trained at the world’s best restaurant: Willows Inn is sheer heaven for foodies. It’s also the antidote to the hustle and bustle of city life, where you’d expect to find such summa cum laude gastronomy. Culinary star-in-the-making Blaine Witzel (age 25) trained at Noma in Copenhagen, where Rene Rezdepi has taken on Ferran Adria’s mantle as today’s most garlanded restaurateur. Now Witzel (pictured below) wows the crowds at this idyllic slow food haven on a tiny island off the coast of Washington State.

The Pacific Northwest is famous for its fabulous shellfish, especially razor clams, but also crabs, oysters and scallops, and fish such as salmon and halibut. They don’t have far to travel to reach your plate. Local organic vegetables provide the supporting roles in Witzel’s starry menus – don’t be surprised to see beach-foraged seaweed make an appearance. “Fished, foraged and farmed,” as they say since many ingredients as possible come from the island itself, and the water around it.

The seven onsite guest rooms in this wood-built inn are a stylish mix of traditional and contemporary featuring organic bathroom goodies, free WIFI and some rooms even have radiant heating, for toasty toes. Two rooms in the detached guest house have their own private decks and bath tubs; you can also stay on the farm where much of the food served at the restaurant is produced, including the eggs, or in stunning beachfront houses and apartments around the island.

If you’re all gourmeted out, have a massage (in your room, if you prefer) or a hot stone treatment in the spa. Then roll down to the nearby beach or venture out into slow-paced Lummi Island, with its thriving community of artists and artisans and respect for the environment; the island is renowned for its sustainable fisheries and eco-farms.

The more adventurous (and die-hard foodies) can take a kayak out to visit the other San Juan islands, minding any Orca whales or seals en route, to forage for sea lettuce, Saragassum, and beach plantain.

Rates from $204 including tax and whale-watching from the comfort of your room; the kayaking is an extra activity.

Photos: Willows Inn, Celebrate Big, coffee&donuts

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Willows Inn, Lummi Island, Washington State appeared first on EcoSalon.

A gourmet slow food paradise in the Smoky Mountains.

In the misty foothills of eastern Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, Blackberry Farm is a delightful and unusual hotel offering a gastro-luxe farm-to-table experience, with southern hospitality.

This being Earth Month, we’ve been reflecting on various ways we’re bringing nature into our homes, for example with micro-sized sexy urban gardens. This rural hotel/farm is at the other end of that scale, a vast 4,200 acre estate with a range of animals including sheep, which produce milk (for cheese), wool and meat; pigs, for sausages and pork; and hens (free-range, naturally), for their eggs. The animals also regenerate the pasture, fertilize, control pests and consume waste products from the farm’s food production.

The gardeners produce heirloom varieties (organically developed over generations, un-genetically-modified) of fruit and vegetables, such as apples, beans and carrots, while wild mushrooms are foraged from the woodlands. They even have black truffles – perfect with fresh eggs for breakfast.

Foodies will truly find heaven, care of the artisans of the farmstead as well as the gardeners. The farm has its own bee-keeper, for instance, and cheese-maker, butcher, plus a preservationist who makes jams, pickles and preserves. There’s a cooking school with celebrity chef guests, as well as a packed program of other food and wine events.

Accommodation is either in a beautiful private house and cottages, or guestrooms in the guesthouse: all is comfortable and classic, with four-poster beds, low-key prints or chintz in muted tones. All rooms and houses have fireplaces, high-speed internet, and integrated surround-sound systems. As well as the outdoor pool, with mountain views, there’s the spa with a wet treatment room offering the latest technology, such as various high-pressure water therapies; yoga classes are also available. Croquet, wildflower hikes and horse-and-carriage rides are other low-impact activities designed to get you in tune with nature, without harming it.

Rates from $345 excluding tax (two night minimum).

Photos: Blackberry Farm

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Blackberry Farm, Tennessee appeared first on EcoSalon.

Rasai Jaipur’s sleeping cubes offer elegant minimalism in a vibrant country.

India’s north-western region of Rajasthan is known for its (literally) colorful characters: women in emerald-green and vermillion saris and moustachioed men with saffron-yellow turbans, standing out like jewels against the dry landscape. Its capital city, Jaipur, is replete with palaces and regal splendor, and nearby is the Rasa Jaipur.

Minimalist white cubes should be about as foreign to this landscape as men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats. But at the Rasa, situated in a green valley surrounded by hills, 40 of these 500-square-foot dwellings look strangely at home. The “tented rooms” provide unfussy, stylish accommodation, with wooden furniture and red stone bathrooms; a canvas curtain allows the air to circulate without compromising on privacy. High ceilings accommodate elongated four-poster beds, while rooms also have outdoor canopied pavilions with chill-out platforms.

Your cube feels palatial in a contemporary way; a modern-day counterpart (free WIFI) to the stone palaces and impressive forts of the “Pink City” a few miles away.

The restaurant is an architectural delight in itself, with the lofty vaulted ceiling offering an ecclesiastical vibe; in case you can tear yourself away to look at the menu, food is creative Indian.

For the adventurous, there are camel and elephant rides; for the sybarites, there’s this.

Rates from $200 including tax, and a haven of peace in a land of constant noise and bustle.

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Rasa Jaipur, India appeared first on EcoSalon.