Amangiri

Amangiri is probably the finest desert hotel in North America. The architecture alone justifies the flight to Utah. Architect Marwan Al-Sayed designed the entire resort around an ancient sandstone mesa, an outcropping of Navajo sandstone sitting at the building’s core, and the result is a long, low complex of poured concrete and desert stone that doesn’t compete with the landscape, it simply becomes part of it.

The main pool is built directly against the mesa face. The spa treatment rooms hover over it. Every sightline in the public spaces has been calibrated to return your attention to the rock. This is architecture with a very clear set of priorities, and it executes them without a wasted detail.

Rooms are exercises in restraint: raw concrete walls, sand-coloured textiles, beds facing floor-to-ceiling windows that frame specific sections of the canyon panorama. The private plunge pools are positioned to catch the changing colours of the Utah sky: electric blue in the desert morning, saffron and crimson at sunset. In the canyon country of southern Utah, those colours are among the most extreme available anywhere on Earth.

The Aman Spa covers 5,000 square metres within the rock. The floating pool, built over a crack in the mesa, puts you in warm water with ancient desert and nothing but rock below. It’s one of the better spatial experiences available in a hotel anywhere.

Lake Powell is 10 kilometres away. Antelope Canyon 50 kilometres. Bryce Canyon 130. Guides run helicopter excursions to canyon formations accessible no other way, kayak trips on the glassy surface of the lake, and guided hikes into slot canyons where the sky narrows to a sliver of blue between walls of undulating sandstone. Book 6–12 months ahead. This isn’t a hotel that sits empty.