This year, as we put together Robb Report’s Best of the Best, I found myself looking for the theme that might explain it all: some tectonic shift connecting the cars, watches, yachts, hotels, art, and experiences that stood apart. Sometimes, an idea like that arrives quickly and organically. This time, it never quite did. And maybe that’s as it should be.

After all, Best of the Best has never been a trend report or market barometer. It is a yearlong act of curation, shaped by our editors’ research, hard-won expertise, and, in many cases, decades spent covering their beats. Now in its 38th edition, the annual issue is a record of the highest expressions of craft, ingenuity, creativity, pleasure, and wonder across 15 categories and from around the globe. 

I recently experienced one of them firsthand at Watches and Wonders in Geneva, where Parmigiani Fleurier debuted its remarkable Tonda PF Chronograph Mystérieux, a world-first chronograph that hides its complexity until the moment it’s summoned. At rest, it reads as a serene, minimalist three-hander; press the monopusher at 7:30, however, and the mystery unfolds through a set of hidden hands. With a final press, it all vanishes back into the dial, as if by magic. As deputy editor Paige Reddinger writes, it is the kind of innovation that suggests the future of watchmaking “won’t be louder—it will be smarter.”

On four wheels, the Czinger 21C V Max comes from an entirely different point of view. Its design is striking, its performance figures outrageous: 1,250 hp, zero to 62 mph in 1.9 seconds, and a 253 mph top speed. What differentiates the Southern California marque is an A.I.-driven design process, 3-D-printed componentry, and robotic assembly—a blueprint for a whole new way to build a hypercar. In a category where excess is often measured in horsepower alone, the 21C V Max takes its ambition directly to the manufacturing floor.

In Carlsbad, Calif., the 24-seat tasting counter Lilo delivers excellence on a more intimate scale. Chef Eric Bost has turned the back of a former boogie-board factory into one of the country’s most compelling new dining rooms, making his return to Best of the Best especially gratifying for us: Bost was meant to be part of the issue once before, in 2020, when his Los Angeles restaurant Auburn closed ahead of press time. With cooking that celebrates local ingredients while drawing from Japan, coastal France, and beyond, he has created what culinary editor Jeremy Repanich calls “a love letter to fine dining and California.”

Travel offers a final change of scenery in the form of the Ghan, a nearly half-mile-long train that crosses the Australian outback. Its new Aurora and Australis suites revive a bygone era of luxury travel with pearlescent coved ceilings, Tasmanian-myrtle-wood paneling, and the continent’s vast interior rolling past the windows. Here, the journey itself is the extravagance, turning slow, long-distance rail into something decidedly cinematic.

These, of course, are only a handful of the selections in this year’s Best of the Best. Each edition begins with inquiry, reporting, plenty of debate, and more than a few strong opinions. It ends with a collection of extraordinary objects, places, and ideas that reflects the year as our editors found it: varied, surprising, occasionally contradictory—and all the richer for it.

Enjoy the issue.