Beautiful Spas Around the World

The building is a black box with a glass room set on top of it, under a flat roof that oversails the glass on every side. Nothing holds the corners up, so the lounge reads as one unbroken band of view: Mount Fuji on one side, Lake Yamanaka on the other, the tree line running between them. It sits in a Special Zone of the national park the Ministry of the Environment administers, where what can be built is tightly bounded. Momoeda Yu designed it inside those limits, with creative direction by Kawanami Hiroaki and construction by Marumasa Watanabe Komusho. It took a place in the Public Architecture category of the iF Design Award 2025, and a special prize at the Dedalo Minosse international architecture prize the same year, whose ceremony is held in Palladio's Teatro Olimpico. Bathing is mixed and swimsuits are worn, with rental available; changing rooms, showers and the cold baths are separate. The sauna is Finnish, with self-service loyly. The cold water is Fuji groundwater, ninety litres a minute, run through rather than recirculated, and clean enough to drink. Cooling off happens outside on the lakeside deck that opened in July 2025, on loungers set above the shore with nothing in front of them. Two and a half hours costs 4,290 yen, thirty minutes more 770 yen, both including a towel set and the drinks and sweets in the lounge. Kayaks and paddleboards run on the lake in summer, gravel bikes from late November. Entry is capped when it is busy, so book.

Paris has always known how to do luxury, but Sant Roch is doing something the city has never seen before. Opened on March 2 just steps from the Tuileries Garden, it is the first venue in France to offer contrast therapy, housing the largest sauna in the country at over 60 square meters, alongside five cold plunge pools kept between 3°C and 8°C. Spread across 400 square meters on two levels, the experience is anchored in immersive guided rituals blending heat, breathwork, sound, and cold for a full nervous system reset. This is not a spa. It is a destination.

Basin Glacial Waters has opened at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in Alberta’s Banff National Park as a new benchmark in luxury wellness set against the turquoise glacial waters of Lake Louise and the towering Canadian Rockies. This 19,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor thermal bathing destination blends minimalist, nature-inspired design by renowned architect Matteo Thun with ancient traditions of thermotherapy to create a sensory-rich experience of heat, cold, movement, and stillness. Guests can explore a sequence of thermal pools, steam rooms, saunas and cold plunges that draw on both Nordic rituals and the surrounding landscape, with unmatched panoramic views throughout. More than a spa, Basin is a deeply restorative retreat that invites reflection and renewal in one of North America’s most spectacular natural settings.

The ground floor holds a dark, spa-quiet room on the 57th Street side, a few chairs and some dark-leaved plants in it, and two lifts. The lobby is fourteen floors up. Warren and Wetmore put the Crown Building up for August Heckscher between 1920 and 1922, French Renaissance over a nine-story base, an octagonal tower under a steep pyramid roof, and a gold-plated rooster turning on top of it until 1942, when it came down for the war's scrap drives. The Museum of Modern Art opened in six rooms on the twelfth floor in November 1929 and stayed until 1932. Douglas Leigh gilded and lit the crown in 1983, and the city landmarked the building in 2024. The restoration Jean-Michel Gathy began in 2017 opened in August 2022, leaving 83 suites on the floors below the lobby, the smallest around 718 square feet and none of them without a working fireplace. Ceilings reach nearly eleven feet over oak and walnut, bronze and blackened steel. Backlit rice paper panels sit inside pivoting louvre doors that shut the bath and its free-standing oval tub off from the bedroom. One of the Homes opens onto a terrace with an infinity pool facing Central Park. A butler comes with every stay. The lobby runs double height, Peter Gentenaar's paper and bamboo sculptures hanging between four stone columns, and off it a wraparound terrace of 7,000 square feet sets a circular fire pit inside a square reflecting pool. A retractable glass roof keeps it open all year. Below, the spa takes three floors and 25,000 square feet, a hammam and a banya in two private houses beside a 65-foot pool, and the jazz club runs deeper still, the one room here that admits anyone. It is underground.