In a first for Design Hotels, its much-loved annual book focused on a single topic: delving into the holistic connectivity of food and its integral role in purposeful travel. The book’s accompanying Art Print Series spotlights two photographs from two of its most inspired food stories, capturing the essence of a dish and its emotional ties, which start from the ingredients and expand out into the community and wider world.

Chapter three of Taste and Place, “Homegrown,” spotlights hotels that take a hyperlocal approach to produce, including Rastrello in Umbria, which is surrounded by 900 olive trees. The accompanying Art Print, also titled Homegrown, is a richly saturated still life by photographer Vivek Vadoliya, who captures the simple abundance of an Umbrian harvest season. Sowing, nurturing, plucking, and preserving a single ingredient, like an olive, with one’s own hands can re-establish a connection to local produce and flavors that can only be experienced in that time and place. 

The second Art Print is Maureen Evans’s ode to Oaxacan cuisine from chapter seven, “With Reverence.” Styled by Tessa Watson, the photograph uses rough textures and light to celebrate both the ordinary and the remarkable, highlighting the ways that even something as commonplace as freshly laid eggs is in dialogue with culture and history in the way livestock and produce are cared for and used. 

All in all, the two prints are embodiments of how “flavors are living, breathing records of a time and place,” as award-winning writer and photographer Nicholas Gill says. “Each taste is felt. We ingest their history. They become a part of us.”

Featuring stories from Design Hotels members, including Rockhouse Hotel in Jamaica, Bursa Hotel in Ukraine, and Satoyama Jujo in Japan, Taste and Place: The Design Hotels Book reveals how the ecosystem of a hotel seen through the lens of food provides a perfect microcosm to better understand bigger systematic changes. From regional terroir through the kitchen to the community that connects us, the book uncovers a plethora of topics spanning social engagement and respect for cultures and ingredients, as well as rethinking food waste and big-picture hospitality. 

The two Art Prints, which work as stand-alone artworks or as a poetic diptych, are available in A0 (€195) and A2 (€95) sizes with blind embossing on museum-quality, 290g/sqm paper made of 90 percent bamboo fibres and are printed in Germany.

Purchase the Art Print Series here, and Taste and Place: The Design Hotels Book here (€59.90).