Banyan Tree Club & Spa Seoul

Set on the slopes of Namsan Mountain in central Seoul, in a conversion of the Tower Hotel — a city landmark built by the first generation of Korean architects. Banyan Tree's Southeast Asian, villa-oriented approach applied to a dense Korean city, and the collision produces something genuinely distinctive.

The defining feature is the in-room water. Most rooms and suites have their own relaxation pool, which allows guests to construct a private bathing sequence rather than share a communal circuit. With only two to four rooms on each floor, the sense of seclusion is unusual for a city hotel.

It operates as three things at once, across three buildings — the Club, the Hotel and the Festa. Sixteen rooms are members-only, and the sports facilities run well beyond a hotel gym: outdoor pool, driving range, tennis courts, a playing field and an ice rink.

The trade-off is cultural. Visitors specifically seeking the traditional Korean bathhouse experience — the scrub, the shared heated floors, the communal ritual of the jjimjilbang — will find this a polished but different proposition, built around privacy rather than sociability. Visitors wanting Korean wellness with international hotel standards and no communal element will find it well judged.