Art Hotels

Borgo Egnazia was built in the 2000s, but it was built to look like something much older. The architects modelled it on the walled towns of the Itria Valley: pale limestone, deep window reveals, courtyards that narrow and then open again. The trick works because the materials are the real ones. Stone was quarried nearby and finished by masons who work on actual historic buildings in the region.

Guests are spread across three kinds of accommodation — rooms in the main house, townhouse-style units along the lanes, and separate villas with their own gardens. The layout means you walk outdoors to get almost anywhere, which is either the charm or the drawback depending on the weather.

Craft runs through the interiors as a working theme rather than a slogan. Ironwork, ceramics, woven textiles and carved stone appear at room scale, and much of it comes from Apulian workshops. The property sits near the Adriatic coast, with olive groves on most sides and the archaeological site of Egnazia a short distance away.

Inside the ramparts of Galle Fort stands a building that has been receiving guests, under one name or another, since the 1860s. Amangalla occupies the former New Oriental Hotel, itself built into Dutch colonial officers' quarters dating from 1684. Little of that structure has been erased. The conversion restored rather than replaced.

Ceilings are high, floors are polished timber, and the shutters are the tall louvred kind that let air move without letting the afternoon in. Furniture is largely antique or made to match antique pieces held in the building. Corridors are wide enough to feel like rooms in their own right.

The fort itself is the property's context and its limitation. Streets outside are narrow and mostly walkable, lined with churches, warehouses and a working lighthouse. Vehicles are awkward here, which suits a hotel that expects arrivals on foot more than at a porte-cochère.

Occupying the top six floors of a tower in Otemachi, Aman Tokyo answers a difficult brief: how to make a high-rise hotel feel quiet. The answer, largely, is the lobby — a room roughly thirty metres tall, framed in dark timber and lit through panels of washi paper that diffuse daylight into something closer to dusk.

Rooms take their cues from traditional domestic architecture without turning it into pastiche. Engawa-style seating sits against the glass, bathrooms are cut from single blocks of stone, and the palette holds to camphor wood, paper and black granite. The restraint is deliberate and consistent.

What the location gives is contrast. Otemachi is a financial district, dense and busy at ground level, with the Imperial Palace gardens immediately west. From the guest floors both are laid out below, which is the point of putting the hotel up there in the first place.