Twelve keys, one courtyard: the year's smallest opening

The year will produce palaces, branded residences, and at least one island that has been 'reimagined'. The opening that matters is smaller. Casa delle Dodici is twelve rooms around a single fountain in Ortigia, opened by a family that already ran the palazzo as a private house and has now admitted the rest of us — on terms.

There is no spa. There is a courtyard, a breakfast that does not pretend to be a restaurant, and a key that opens a door onto limestone that has been here longer than the idea of a boutique hotel. The rate is not modest. Small is not a discount. Small is the refusal to add the seventeenth room that would pay for a gym.

We will watch the first winter. Houses this size either become a club for people who found them early, or they panic and add a rooftop. The register will keep the code either way. If you go in the first season, go because the courtyard is the point, not because you want to have been first.