Tokyo Smart Splurges

Where to begin at this 179-room gem atop the Nihombashi financial district? The lobby is on the 38^th floor, decked out with innovative, geometric textiles by the über-modern Tokyo design studio Nuno and boasting stellar city panoramas. Don’t expect to so much as push a door handle as you make your way around, thanks to the hotel’s exemplary staff with a seeming sixth sense for catering to guests’ needs. Power lunch at the Signature French restaurant (with a chef from Nice and an interior by Ryu Kosaka), or linger over cocktails poured by an all-female bartending staff. In the fitness center, pick up a tea blend in a Chinese takeout container. Downstairs (the rooms are below the lobby), slink through the hallways of collection-worthy ceramics, to guest rooms that could easily accommodate two rooms from other hotels. Enjoy a technologically tricked-out room with features like iPod plug-ins and high-def TV, relax on your yoga mat, or make the most important decision of the day: which of the three (or even four!) shower heads to use?

Tokyo Midtown, the shopping/dining/entertainment/museum complex opened spring 2007, has become an overnight success, and we give much of the credit to this marvelous hotel. Ascend 45 stories into the sky to reach the lobby: note the enormous Sam Francis paintings (said to have cost $5 million) and then feast on the view across the world’s largest metropolis from the city’s tallest building. Rooms are filled with elegant textures from silk to terrycloth, and we also love the bathrooms, larger than entire rooms at Japanese business hotels and perhaps the first bathrooms we’d ever describe as classically proportioned. When you’re done marveling, relaxing in the pool or enjoying cocktails or afternoon tea in the lobby, head downstairs to check out Midtown. There are two museums on site – the Suntory Museum of Art and 21-21; visit the nearby National Art Center (also opened 2007) and you can return home telling your friends you’ve seen Tokyo’s latest . . . until the next latest thing comes along.

Just a three minutes’ walk to Tokyo Station (for easy arrival and quick getaways) is this 57-room den of noble, striated wood and stonework. The intimate scale, low-rise profile, and triple-pane, floor-to-ceiling windows allow you to appreciate the street life (or train life) before sinking back in your leather-canopy-topped bed on one of five types of pillows. Marble bathrooms feature slate flooring and hideaway, three-way mirrors. Be sure to visit the spa, where the ingredients in the treatments – white lotus, ginger flower, rice – sound as delicious as they feel. The Ekki restaurant and bar is an explosion of green velour with orange and yellow accents.

The public spaces of this old-time standby and longtime favorite of North American visitors (not least for its proximity to the American embassy) feel deliberately, and charmingly, stuck in the mid-century Japonesque phase. Although the Okura is large at 830-plus rooms, the Japanese garden and tea ceremony room make it seem smaller and more manageable. The western-style rooms are subdued, with subtle Japanese touches like shoji screen patterns in the windows. Check for specials that include use of the indoor swimming pool. When you’re ready to leave, it’s a short ride to business districts or the nightlife of Roppongi.

The sleek, minimalist rooms at the hotel made famous for its starring role in Lost in Translation sit atop a tower by Pritzker Prize-winner Kenzo Tange. Top-rated restaurants include the New York Grill for steaks and Girandole for buffet breakfast with a view.

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