The Sukhothai Bangkok

While Bangkok's luxury market has chased ever-taller towers, The Sukhothai has held its ground since 1991 as an argument for horizontal grace. Designed by Ed Tuttle, the architect behind several of Aman's most admired resorts, it arranges low pavilions around courtyards and lily ponds on a garden estate off Sathorn Road, with rows of brick chedis rising from the water in homage to the ancient capital that lends the hotel its name. The effect remains one of the great arrival sequences in Asian city hotels.

Interiors deploy teak, granite and Thai silk with a restraint that has aged far better than the gilded excess of many contemporaries. Rooms are calm and generously sized, dressed in celadon and earth tones with artisanal Thai details; garden-facing quarters barely register the city outside. Service carries the graceful, unhurried formality of Thai hospitality at its best.

Celadon, serving refined Thai cuisine in a pavilion amid the lotus ponds, has been a destination in its own right for decades, while La Scala covers Italian and the colonnaded lobby salon does a properly elegant afternoon tea. A 25-metre pool and serious spa complete the retreat. Lumpini Park and the Sathorn business district are close, and the trade-off—no river views, no skyline bar—buys a serenity no tower can match.