To us, little is worse than the word "design" being abused as marketing shorthand for "hip," as in "design hotel." Concierge.com's Danielle Pergament writes:

...in recent years we've discovered a lot of style and no substance [in design hotels]: bare spaces, a dearth of right angles, rooms that hide all amenities from sight.... Design hotels went from clever and niche finds to generic commodities manufactured by W Hotels and their offspring.

Hear, hear.

Of course, concierge.com does want you to travel, so they've come up with their own list of 12 design hotels around the world that satisfies a tighter description:

...there's a new generation of design hotels, one that rejects the notion that a slab of concrete is a place to sit. Whether they're reducing their environmental footprint, employing local artisans, or using the natural world as an extension of their aesthetic...these new contenders are creative and inspired....

With categories like "Antidote to minimalism," "Affordable design" and "Nature as design," the roundup covers a wide gamut. The pick we found the oddest was New England's schizophrenic Winvian, which features fifteen cottages all designed by different architects; the odd mish-mash of styles includes everything from an Ewok-like treehouse to a bungalow built around a freakin' Sikorsky helicopter.

Innovation is good, but we like to see a little cohesion, people!