Aman Tokyo

Aman Tokyo

Occupying the top six floors of the Otemachi Tower, from the 33rd to the 38th, in the financial district of Otemachi, a short walk from the Imperial Palace moat and Tokyo Station, Aman Tokyo opened in December 2014 as the brand's first Japanese property, designed by the late Kerry Hill, the Australian architect who went on to design Aman Kyoto and had already shaped much of the group's aesthetic language across Asia. The building itself is a 2014 addition to the Otemachi financial cluster, and Hill's brief was to insert a sense of Japanese domestic scale, the engawa, the garden, the washi screen, into a vertical office tower forty storeys up. The hotel has 84 rooms and suites, the smallest starting at 71 square metres, making it one of the more spacious city hotels in Tokyo by any measure. Aman Resorts was founded by Adrian Zecha in 1988, and Aman Tokyo remains one of the group's most architecturally ambitious urban properties, run today with the quiet formality that marks the brand's Japanese operations. The lobby occupies a six storey atrium, its centrepiece a stone-clad reflecting pool lit by a canopy of washi paper lanterns, meant to recall the paper lanterns of a traditional Japanese garden pavilion rather than a hotel entrance. Camphor wood columns and Oya stone floors run through the public spaces, and each guest room uses traditional shoji-inspired screens to filter light rather than curtains in the conventional sense. Bathrooms feature deep, freestanding hinoki cypress soaking tubs, positioned by the window in most rooms so bathing becomes a way of looking at the city rather than a private errand. The spa spans two floors, with hinoki bathing facilities and treatment rooms drawing on both Japanese and other Asian traditions, and a 30 metre pool lit from above by a skylight runs the length of one floor. Food is anchored by The Restaurant, serving Japanese cuisine with a strong emphasis on seasonal kaiseki-style presentation, alongside Arva, an Italian restaurant that has become a reliable, if less discussed, part of the programme. Staying here feels less like checking into a hotel and more like being granted access to a private wing of the city that happens to float above it, the scale of the rooms and the discipline of the interiors doing more to communicate luxury than any obvious flourish. It suits travellers who want proximity to the Imperial Palace, Otemachi, and Tokyo Station without sacrificing quiet, and who find real value in space and light over density of amenities. It is not a hotel that performs for you; the atrium and the lanterns are dramatic on arrival, but the daily experience is restrained, almost monastic in its use of natural materials and negative space. You should not come if you want a hotel with a strong sense of neighbourhood texture at street level, since Otemachi is a business district that empties out at night and on weekends. You should not come if you're drawn to maximalist design or a dense programme of activities within the hotel itself. You should come for the scale of the rooms, the discipline of Kerry Hill's architecture, and a Tokyo base that treats altitude and quiet as luxuries in their own right. The short version: A 2014 Kerry Hill building on the top floors of Otemachi Tower with 84 rooms, a six storey atrium garden, hinoki soaking tubs, and a sense of scale rare in central Tokyo.