The Collection House is an independent classification system for luxury hotels and resorts. A rating tells you how good a house is. A classification tells you what kind of house it is.
The industry is ranked in one dimension — stars, keys, points, lists. The Collection House builds the other axis. We award no stars and publish no league table. Each collection asks a single declared question — is this a world of its own? does the island carry the whole stay? is the address itself the reason to come? — and admits a house only if the answer is yes.
One property, one identifier. Every house in the key carries a permanent number, and each collection admits it through its own sensor: territory for Private Resorts, the island as a whole stay for Private Island Resorts, the Palace distinction for Palace Hotels of France, authorship of the house for Boutique. A house may belong to several collections at once, or to none.
Every answer is read from what the operator publishes — never from reputation, price or a press release — and the page we read is recorded against the house with the date we read it. Where a house has not been read, we say so rather than guess: unmeasured and failed are different states, and both are published as such.
The classification is written down before it is applied: the question, the sensor, the threshold and the grounds for exclusion. A verdict without a stated ground is not a verdict, so the ground is published beside it. That is what makes the collections checkable by anyone — including against us.
We do not award stars. We ask what kind of house this is — and we publish the ground.
