Pinniped, I would say to you that your 'go to' Booking com will not get you the best price for unique independent hotels in Europe. Again, using the small boutique hotel in Switzerland I linked in my OP, I can tell you this. Your 'go to' only lists the rooms that are available to them obviously. The hotel only makes their highest priced rooms available to them. So if you look at your 'go to' for a week in June for example, you will see a price of $1962 CAD with breakfast. While in fact, the hotel will offer you direct, a standard double room for $700 CAD for the same time period. That is not to say there are not some differences in the room types obviously. But the prime differences are only in room size and price. Everything else is much the same as you can see from the photos on the hotel's own website if you wish to look.

But the real point is that with your 'go to', you are not made aware, or given the choice to make, of what kind of room you want to book from what is actually available at the hotel. So if you are comfortable with searching directly for more unique places to stay, then I would suggest you do so for all of Europe as you have been doing for the UK and France but search outside of your 'go to' site.

Also if you don't already know it, you might find the Sawday's website one you would like. https://www.sawdays.co.uk/ Unfortunately, they don't cover all countries in Europe but for those they do cover, they have some very interesting properties listed. For example, one I linked earlier in this thread was found using the Sawday's site. https://www.sawdays.co.uk/france/pic...sne/la-quincy/

In the UK, we have found properties several times that are owned by the National Trusts. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/holidays for England and for Scotland, https://www.nts.org.uk/Holidays/Advanced-Search/
Here is one I can suggest that is right on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. https://www.nts.org.uk/Holidays/Acco...adstones-Land/ There is no better location in all of Edinburgh really. The lower floors are a museum with 2 rentals above. Here is the view from the street. https://www.theedinburghreporter.co....SGLLp00045.jpg

There are far more ways to search for unique properties than the usual suspect third party online booking sites. Many of the more unique properties aren't even on the usual booking sites.