There’s a degree of self-punishment one has to accept when looking through Stefi Orazi’s brilliant new book, Modernist Escapes: An Architectural Travel Guide. With overnight stays in anywhere but your own home forbidden, and the question of the possibility of international travel this year still very much lacking a definitive answer, looking through a compendium of 130 of the most accomplished examples of modernism that are open to the public (either for day visits and/or overnight stays) is somewhat torturous.

But we live in hope, and Orazi’s selection of buildings by the likes of Luis Barragán, Gio Ponti, Eero Saarinen and John Winter reads like a wish list itinerary for any modernism-loving traveller. The first example sets the tone: did you know that you can book an overnight stay in Philip Johnson’s Glass House? Neither did we. It includes a dinner for 10 guests and full access to Johnson’s glass-covered pavilion, itself a mid-century ode to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. (Full disclosure: research reveals the stay to cost $30,000, but, while we’re playing the game of fantasy travel plans…)

What sets Orazi’s book apart from the two-a-penny books on modernist architecture is her desire to take you inside the buildings featured, not just to ogle at the sheer-faced glazed façades, but to get under the skin of how these buildings were designed to be inhabited. Remembering an architour trip to Vienna, Orazi’s recalls, “As we wandered among the houses, designed by the likes of Adolf Loos and Gerrit Rietveld, what I really wanted to do was look inside them. People have long had a fascination with other people’s homes, especially those that belonged to creative individuals and are filled with the artefacts of everyday human life. Not only do they make us feel closer to their inhabitants and the times they were living in, we also get a better understanding of the architect who designed them.”

As a visitor to The Modern House website, you’ll be well aware of the endless appeal of snooping around the interiors of well-designed spaces. Call it escapism if you want – Modernist Escapes certainly makes the case for that being no bad thing.

Photographs courtesy of Prestel Publishing.