Ten miles inland from the fog, on five hundred sun-warmed acres, Carmel Valley Ranch offers a rustic kind of luxury — a Pete Dye golf course and hilltop vineyard beside beehives, saltwater pools, and picnics with a pair of Sicilian mini donkeys. A high-summer Peninsula hideaway where the land, not the lobby, is the luxury.

The Grande Dame of Carmel: how a 1905 stone mansion built by painter Chris Jorgensen for chocolate heiress Angela Ghirardelli became La Playa, the historic hotel recently reborn through a restrained restoration by Post Company.

Twelve hundred feet above the Pacific, Mickey Muennig’s masterwork was designed from its first sketch to vanish into the ridge — sod roofs, treehouses on stilts, and the oldest luxury on this coast: the coast itself.