One
Opened on 18 March 2019 on the site of Holt's Wharf, land the Cheng family has held since the 1970s. Sixty-five storeys by Kohn Pedersen Fox, interiors by Tony Chi, 322 rooms and 91 suites. The owner, the developer and the operator are the same family, and that is the whole explanation for the finish. Nobody signs off on this level of material when they are answering to a landlord on a twenty-year lease.
What makes it our first pick is the decision to stack the public rooms high instead of burying them at street level, so you arrive into harbour light rather than into a basement lobby. The art is a genuine collection rather than commissioned hotel decoration: Henry Moore's Three Piece Reclining Figure, Draped stands on the terrace, and there is work by Damien Hirst and Wang Keping inside. It is hung the way a house hangs pictures, low and without labels.
Go to DarkSide on the ground floor for the live jazz, which runs most nights and draws Hong Kong rather than hotel guests. Eat at The Legacy House, where the kitchen cooks Shunde Cantonese properly, including the slow dishes most hotels have dropped. The Manor Club sits on the fortieth floor with the best sightline in the building, and Asaya, the spa, is given two full floors instead of the windowless podium it would get anywhere else. The Butterfly Patisserie is worth the detour on the way out.
Affiliation · Rosewood Elite
Two
Opened on 17 December 2020 across 200 metres of river frontage in Charoenkrung, which is the longest single stretch of the Chao Phraya held by any hotel in Bangkok. Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston did the interiors, Hamiltons the architecture, AvroKo the restaurants. Instead of one tower on a podium, the site is laid out as tiered buildings stepping down to the water and linked at ground level by courtyards.
That layout is the reason it is here. Bangkok's grand hotels are either colonial and small or modern and vertical, and the vertical ones put the traffic under your window. Here the river is the organising fact of the building from every level, and there are almost no rooms that face away from it. The ART Space, run with MOCA Bangkok, runs the full depth of the property from the lobby to the river wall and changes exhibitions several times a year.
Book a table at BKK Social Club and go before dinner rather than after, because the bar fills with Bangkok from about nine and the room is better when you can see it. Yu Ting Yuan is the Cantonese room and the only restaurant Gathy designed himself. Riva del Fiume handles the Italian side and Brasserie Palmier the French. The Urban Wellness Centre covers 2,500 square metres with a 30-metre lap pool, which is a genuine swimming pool rather than a plunge with a view.
Affiliation · Four Seasons Preferred Partner
Three
Opened on 2 September 2024, and it is not a hotel building at all. It is 42 restored courtyard houses in the Caochang lanes, a working hutong inside Beijing's Central Axis conservation district, within walking distance of Qianmen, the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Each courtyard has its own gate, its own walls and its own tree.
It is on the list because it cannot be built again. The lanes are protected, so the only lawful way to open a hotel on this ground was to restore the houses that were already standing, one at a time, to the heights and rooflines that were already there. The result is that you are inside old Beijing rather than looking at it from the twentieth floor of a tower in Wangfujing. Xu Bing made the house fan in his Square Word Calligraphy, which is the single best object in any hotel room in China.
Eat at Yan Garden, where Chef Fei cooks Cantonese, and at VICINI for regional Italian if you are staying more than two nights. TIAO is the cocktail bar and works Beijing ingredients without being clever about it. Take afternoon tea at the Maple Lounge for the courtyard rather than the pastry. The Spa has private treatment suites and its own tea house. With only 42 keys this is the hardest property on the list to hold at short notice, so it is the one to ask about first.
Affiliation · Mandarin Oriental Fan Club
Four
Opened on 14 March 2025, and the newest hotel on this list by a year. Shaun Killa of Killa Design shaped the whole building as a superyacht under way, drawing on Riva's hulls, so the elevations curve and taper rather than stack. Three hundred rooms and 86 suites, with its own superyacht marina and promenade alongside.
Dubai opens large hotels constantly and most of them compete on height or on a headline number. This one competes on the building, which is why it is here. The hull form puts sea on two sides of most of the property and turns the corridor problem of big resorts into a set of curved galleries that actually read as one continuous space. It is the first new Dubai hotel in some years where the architecture is the reason to go rather than the amenity list.
Fourteen restaurants and bars sounds like padding until you read the list. Mirabelle for French Mediterranean, Rialto for northern Italian, Kinugawa for contemporary Japanese, The Bombay Club for Indian, Iliana for Greek, The Cullinan for steak and LITT for cocktails. Talise Spa runs over three floors with a 20-metre indoor pool, and the adults-only pool is the one to use if you are not travelling with children, because the main resort pool is busy from ten in the morning.
Affiliation · Jumeirah Passport to Luxury
Five
Opened in April 1925. Hippolyte Jammet bought the Castellane mansion at 112 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1923 and built the hotel behind its facade. The Oetker family acquired it in 1978 and added the west wing on the old convent grounds two years later. In 2011 it became the first hotel in France to be granted the Palace distinction, and it passed a hundred years in 2025.
The reason it is on this list is the garden. There is a walled French garden at the centre of the building, full-grown, with lawn and clipped box, and in the eighth arrondissement on that street no other hotel can add one. It is what makes a city hotel feel like a house. Every room on the garden side looks into it rather than onto the Faubourg.
Swim on the sixth floor. The pool was added in 1980 and designed by Caesar Pinnau, the architect who did the interiors of Onassis's yacht, and it is built as a boat's prow in teak with a glazed roof the length of the room and a trompe-l'œil rig painted on the wall. It is the most underrated room in Paris and almost nobody who has not stayed has seen it. Book Épicure, which took its third Michelin star in 2009, for lunch in the garden rather than dinner inside. 114 Faubourg, the brasserie, took its own star in 2013 and is the easier table. Socrate, a Sacred Birman, has run the lobby since 2021.
Affiliation · Oetker Collection Pearl Partner
Six
Opened on 4 April 2023 on floors 40 to 45 of Tokyo Midtown Yaesu, directly above the Yaesu exit of Tokyo Station. Ninety-eight rooms and suites, designed by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, as every Bulgari hotel has been.
Tokyo's luxury hotels are concentrated in Marunouchi, Otemachi and Roppongi, and they all share the same problem: you are in a tower, and the tower is the experience. This one turns the position into the argument. Being on top of Tokyo Station means the country is underneath the building. You can be in Kyoto in two hours and fifteen minutes without getting into a car, which for anyone combining Tokyo with the rest of Japan is worth more than a garden.
Eat at Il Ristorante Niko Romito on the fortieth floor, which holds a Michelin star and seats 62 inside and 34 on the terrace, and ask for the terrace if the weather allows because the sightline runs the length of the Yaesu side. Sushi Hōseki is the eight-seat counter. The Bulgari Bar is on the forty-fifth. The spa takes 1,800 square metres of the fortieth floor with nine treatment rooms, and the 25-metre indoor pool sits behind full-height glass at that height, which is the thing people remember.
Affiliation · Marriott STARS
Seven
Opened on 13 August 1923. President Epitácio Pessoa decided Rio needed a hotel worthy of the Independence Centenary Exposition, and Otávio Guinle built it between 1919 and 1923 to a design by the French architect Joseph Gire, who modelled it on the Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes. The pool was added in 1934. The Golden Room opened in 1938 with Maurice Chevalier on the first night.
It is on this list because it is the reason Copacabana is Copacabana. The hotel came before the beachfront. Avenida Atlântica as anyone recognises it was built around this white facade, and a century later it is still the only building on that beach that does not look like it is trying. James Sherwood bought it in 1989, which is why it is a Belmond today.
One practical note before you book for this season: the Pool Wing, the spa and Ristorante Hotel Cipriani are closed for renovation until November 2026, with a sixth-floor pool in service in the meantime. What is open is worth going for. MEE holds a Michelin star for its pan-Asian cooking and is the best restaurant in the building. Pérgula does the Brazilian side and the poolside lunch. Walk the black and white Portuguese pavement in front of the hotel early, before seven, because it is the only hour Copacabana belongs to the people who live there.
Affiliation · Belmond Bellini Club
Eight
Opened in February 2023, and only the twelfth hotel Peninsula has ever run, which is the first thing worth knowing about it. One hundred and seventy-seven rooms across four buildings on the Galataport waterfront in Karaköy. Three of the four are protected landmarks: Merkez Han of 1912, Çinili Han of 1910, and the Karaköy passenger terminal, which Rebii Gorbon won a competition to design in 1936 and which opened to ships on 1 July 1940. Interiors by Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu, gardens by Enzo Enea.
The restoration is the achievement and the reason it is our pick. Rather than gutting the terminal, they kept its proportions and made the new-build defer to it, so the complex reads as a piece of the working port rather than a development dropped into one. Istanbul has many good hotels and very few great positions. This is the best position in the city, with the ferries passing close enough to be part of the day, and Renzo Piano's Istanbul Modern next door.
Eat at Gallada on the roof, which the hotel runs with Fatih Tutak, whose own restaurant holds two Michelin stars in the city. Drink at Topside, the bar set under the terminal's clock tower, at the hour the Bosphorus traffic turns. The indoor pool runs 25 metres under a ceiling worked in muqarnas, and the outdoor pool sits inside Enea's sculpture garden. The spa takes 1,675 square metres below ground and the hammams there are the real thing rather than a spa treatment named after one.
Affiliation · Peninsula PenClub
Nine
Opened on 30 October 2019. Seventy rooms, nine of them suites, on the slope directly below Kōdai-ji temple in Higashiyama. Takenaka Corporation built it, Tony Chi did the interiors, and the buildings step up the hillside rather than presenting a facade to the lane.
Kyoto restricts height, materials and rooflines in Higashiyama and has done for decades, which means the number of hotels that can put you inside the historic quarter is very small and will not grow. That is the argument for this one. You leave the door onto Nene-no-michi and walk up to Kiyomizu-dera before the coaches arrive, rather than crossing the city from a tower near the station. The Yasaka Pagoda is the view from the upper floors, not a detour.
The thing to plan around is Kyoyamato, the ryotei on the hotel grounds, which has been run by the same family for seven generations since 1877 and takes outside diners as well as guests. Reserve it when you reserve the room, not on arrival. Yasaka is the teppanyaki counter with the city below it, Kohaku the craft spirits bar, and The Living Room does breakfast and tea. The spa treatment suites each have their own bath house with a Japanese tub and a mist sauna, and the oils are pressed from green tea grown locally. Go up to Kōdai-ji at dusk in November when the garden is lit, because you are two minutes from the gate and everyone else is queuing for a taxi.
Affiliation · Hyatt Privé
Ten
Opened on 30 March 2009. One hundred and twelve rooms, 38 villas and two colonial manors on 30 acres of Sentosa. Norman Foster designed the curved new building that wraps the slope, and the two Tanah Merah bungalows at the centre of the site were built in the 1880s as mess halls for the British Royal Artillery. They were restored rather than replaced, and they hold the public rooms.
In Singapore, land is the luxury. Everything else on the island can be bought and most of it has been. Thirty acres of mature planting twenty minutes from Raffles Place cannot be assembled a second time, and that is why it closes our ten. The walk from a villa to breakfast goes through trees rather than down a corridor, which is not a small thing in a city of 300 hectares of hotel podium.
About seventy peacocks live on the grounds and regard the lawns as theirs, so keep the terrace doors shut. The pools are terraced down through the planting in three stages rather than sitting on a deck. Fiamma is the poolside Italian and its Sunday champagne brunch is the one meal to plan the weekend around. Cassia, the Cantonese room, was designed by André Fu. Bob's Bar looks south over the shipping lanes, which is the view worth taking a drink to at six. Auriga, the spa, works to lunar cycles, and it is the rare wellness idea that survives contact with the treatment.
Affiliation · Virtuoso
Ten cities. Ten hotels we would put our own name against.
Rendezvous Travel Collection
Our ten for 2026: Rosewood Hong Kong, Four Seasons Bangkok at Chao Phraya River, Mandarin Oriental Qianmen in Beijing, Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab in Dubai, Le Bristol in Paris, Bulgari Tokyo, Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, The Peninsula Istanbul, Park Hyatt Kyoto and Capella Singapore. One hotel per city, each chosen for what the property itself is rather than for a score.
No. Every hotel on this list is booked at its own published rate and pays the advisor commission from its own margin. Nothing is added to the guest's bill. What changes is what is attached to the reservation: daily breakfast, a property credit, an upgrade where one is free, and the booking flagged to the hotel before arrival.
It depends on the brand, and on this list the answer splits three ways. Four Seasons, Rosewood, Belmond, Oetker and Peninsula run no points programme at all, so nothing can be lost. Hyatt Privé and Marriott STARS are qualifying rates that earn full points and elite nights. Mandarin Oriental is the exception: its Fan Club and its own guest programme are mutually exclusive, so you choose one.
Tell us what you have in mind, and we will arrange it with the standing of a preferred partner.