Aman Tokyo was the first resort by Aman Resorts set in the heart of a city. Its design is the work of the Australian architect Kerry Hill, and a review by Bill Tikos for The Cool Hunter describes a stay in a top-floor suite as something closer to a spa retreat in the sky than an ordinary city hotel.
Six floors at the top of the Otemachi Tower
The hotel fills levels 33 to 38 of the Otemachi Tower, the headquarters of Mizuho Bank, a tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. It opened in 2014. From the Otemachi district, guests look over the Imperial Palace Gardens and other Tokyo landmarks, and Ginza with its boutiques is only a short walk away.
Kerry Hill and Aman
Kerry Hill specialised in hotels in tropical Asia. He worked for the Indonesian hotelier Adrian Zecha long before Zecha founded Aman Resorts in 1988, when he saw a market for minimalist high-end boutique resorts in remote natural settings. Hill went on to design nine of the 32 Aman resorts open at the time of the review, among them two in Sri Lanka, one in China, one in Cambodia and one in Shima, some 300 km south-east of Tokyo. He died in August 2018, aged 75, and the review counts Aman Tokyo among his major works.
A lobby like a museum hall
Arrival is on the 33rd floor. The reviewer compares the entrance lobby to the hall of a major art gallery: very high ceilings, large areas of open space and a volume close to 30 metres tall, framed by engawa, the wooden element that traditionally separates inside from outside in Japanese buildings. The view over the city is part of the first impression.
Wide corridors and Japanese plaster art
Corridors to the suites and deluxe rooms are wide with high ceilings, without the cramped feel of many hotel hallways. Art runs through the whole building. The review singles out stucco flowers in the corridors by Syuhei Hasado, one of the few plasterers still practising sakan, the traditional craft of Japanese plaster, which he combines with contemporary techniques.
Suites built around the bath
A suite works like a private residence, with separate living and dining areas and bedrooms. Its centre is the bathroom with a furo, a deep Japanese soaking tub, set against floor-to-ceiling windows so that bathing comes with a view across the city. Rooms are finished in washi paper, wood and stone, in a calm palette of earth tones.
The spa and pool
The pool and spa level shares the same large scale and high ceilings. The heated indoor pool is 30 metres long and looks out over the skyline, and the reviewer recommends it at sunset. At the time of the visit the hotel was almost four years old, yet the review notes that everything still looked spotless and orderly.
Service
The review gives special credit to the staff and the concierge team. For first-time visitors who did not speak Japanese, the concierges suggested places they would not have found on their own and booked tables at restaurants that are hard to get into.
Credits
- Hotel: Aman Tokyo, Otemachi Tower (levels 33–38), Otemachi, Tokyo
- Hotel design: Kerry Hill
- Tower architecture: Kohn Pedersen Fox
- Plaster art: Syuhei Hasado
- Review: Bill Tikos
- Source: The Cool Hunter