HOTELS: 3 of a kind
RADISSON BLU HOTEL
221 North Colombus Drive, Chicago, 00-1-312-5655258, radissonblu.com/ aquahotel-chicago. From $200-$275/room per night
What: Chicago's newest skyscraper is the Aqua, a slender 86-storey affair with balconies that seem to flow across its glassy facade (below left). The building is the tallest in the world to have a woman, Jeanne Gang, as its lead architect. The vast lobby area features a 50 foot long fireplace. Rooms have some sparkly granite-style flooring and vast, pillow-heaped beds. Breakfast is in a big clattery cafe with Italian overtones. The location is excellent – it's a five minute-walk to Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile of shops, while five minutes in another direction will take you to Millennium Park and the superb Art Institute of Chicago. Less than two months old, the hotel is already attracting a crowd at its cocktail bar, while the tourists are busy on the outside taking pictures.
HOTEL THERME VALS
Switzerland, 00-41-81-9268080, therme-vals.ch, from €84 pps
What: Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor has created a hotel and spa that manages to be glamorous without a hint of bling (left). On first appearances the hotel – far, far up a Swiss valley – doesn't resemble great architecture but that is because much of it is converted from a 1960s hotel. Yet the spa area is a designer's dream and that is reflected in the clientele: all intellectual European designers dressed in the perfect combination of style and quirk. All food is locally sourced or organic where possible and you will be well advised to sit through the buffet breakfast until it stops at 11am because there's an awful lot of lattes, herb teas, organic juices, local cheeses, squishy white and various grainy bread, and cereals to get through. And the people watching is practically full-time.
The spa has whole rooms full of water: including an outdoor pool where you can jump on snow before leaping into the hot water and then lie and look up a mountain. There’s a very hot indoor pool; a freezing pool; flower petals pool; sound pool and so on, all lined in textural quartz. Hotels guests get a midnight swim twice a week.
Most rooms are small but feel comfortable with their floor-to-ceiling glass walls looking out on to the Alps and shower “trays” consisting of heated stone slabs. Lying on these while reading is something.
YAS VICEROY HOTEL
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 00-9-712-6560000, viceroyhotelsandresorts.com/abudhabi. From €230 for a double
What:The sweeping gridshell that veils this 499-room hotel actually straddles a Formula 1 track. It is on Yas Island, 20 minutes from Abu Dhabi and 45 minutes from Dubai, where pleasure is laid out across the 7.5km by 6.5km isle in the form of car racing, a championship golf course, an indoor theme park and a harbour, plus shopping malls a-plenty from here to Abu Dhabi. This pair of 12-storey buildings are linked by a bridge that crosses the Formula 1 track. New York architecture firm Asymptote designed the building to reflect the speed of the cars whizzing beneath it and the Islamic culture in which the surrounding land is steeped. So the 217-meter gridshell made from thousands of glazed diamond panels is lit with rich reds and purples at night, and internal furnishings include lattice screens and upholstery in natural pigments.
Bedroom wise, you can choose to watch cars or boats, depending on whether you face the track or harbour, and in many of the rooms this is done through floor-to-ceiling glass.