When the Park Hyatt opened on the 14 highest floors of the Kenzo Tange-designed Shinjuku Park Tower in 1994, it established a template that dozens of luxury Tokyo hotels would follow. Just as Ian Schrager reinvented ground floor hotel lobbies as nightclubs in New York ten years before, the world’s third Park Hyatt established a new paradigm for Tokyo: Everyone would have a room that felt like a penthouse and the ground level was purely incidental. Staff relieved you of your luggage as you exited your taxi, whisked you into an elevator up to reception on the 41st floor, and your suitcases were already in the room before you got to it.
Architect Tange was a modernist in the Le Corbusier mold, which is evident in the aggressive silhouette of the now quite fabulously dated three-part tower. The hotel’s original interior designer, John Morford, created spaces that amplified that exterior perfectly, with expansive mid-century modern luxury more Manhattan Seagram Building than post-Japanese bubble economy.
The Hyatt has called the 19-months of work that Paris-based Studio Jouin Manku carried out on the interior a “restoration” rather than refurb, and that’s what it is. Which is remarkable: Has any hotel ever been this self-assured? The glass pyramid ceiling shapes of The Peak lounge and the swimming pool, reminiscent of IM Pei’s Louvre, remain intact, while the artwork, live jazz, lighting, and layout of the New York Bar on the highest floor is exactly as it was when it featured so prominently in the 2003 Sofia Coppola film Lost in Translation, making the hotel a megastar. The restoration is about the nuance of new materials to make things feel freshly minted while also familiar.
There’s a reason, of course, why the hotel’s reopening has generated impossible-to-evaluate levels of PR. White Lotus brought bounties for the sales and marketing teams of the San Domenica in Taormina and Four Seasons in Koh Samui, but what Lost in Translation did for the Park Hyatt brand worldwide is up there with Warhol choosing Campbell’s Soup as the subject for silkscreens.
Pop culture legacy aside, the hotel’s part in the film’s narrative is profound – here’s a place that puts you at a distance from everything: in a literal sense, from the charmless bits of Shinjuku directly below, while also making you feel like you’ve shifted into a parallel dimension. It’s science fiction styled with Noguchi washi paper lanterns, 1920s modernist chrome-framed furniture, and retro, soft green graph-paper-pattern hallway carpets.
The hotel featured in the Lost In Translation film ©The Park Hyatt Tokyo
Stay
The rooms here were the height of luxury in the 1990s but were then superseded by the flash of newer properties. It’s here that most changes have taken place in terms of hardware, but the décor is still pared back to the point of being vanilla, albeit the fancy kind, with bits of the pod visible in the mix – organic and pricey, not just “essence of”. A room sensor triggers the opening of the curtains when you walk in, taking your attention straight out to the view. The marble in the bathrooms is greige, the products are Aesop, and there are dried-leaf sculptures on ledges above the taupe leather headboards. Everything is meticulous, but some of it will look bland to guests with maximalist tastes. What’s not immediately apparent is most impressive: the heavy, curved wooden minibars with hand-stitched leather inset elements are evidence of haute craft.
Outside of the rooms, service is impossible to fault, and the introduction of a welcome glass of champagne while you check in, before you’re given your leatherette key fob, is a nice touch.
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Dine
The New York Bar is as impressive as ever, with a few surprise touches. The Manhattans come with three cherries and chestnut soup has bites of candied chestnut in the mix. The space is demarked by different entry routes between the jazz bar and the restaurant proper, which is an old-school grill affair: Omnivores choose something medium rare from a lengthy list of cuts of cattle (five different Japanese options, two USDA), as well as shrimp cocktails, crudo, clam chowder, and everything else you’d want from the grill restaurant of your dreams. Think of it as the 21 Club reopened in the afterlife.
Downstairs Alain Ducasse has put his name to Girandole, which is also the breakfast space. This is a serious brasserie, with booths, foie gras, and some table-side flaming theatrics. Leaving Girandole, you can look down into Kozue, the hotel’s kaiseki restaurant that offers classic Japanese dishes with innovative twists, distributed by kimono-clad servers on ceramics so stunning that they could elevate prison food to high art.
See also: The Best Restaurants in Tokyo
Relax
The Club on the Park on floor 45 is a member’s spa that visiting guests can access for JPY 5,500 (approx. $35) per day. It’s another space that’s been remade rather than reinvented, with the familiar black veined marble, low key glitzy tiles, amber wood, and Hollywood mirror globe lights. This is truly a whole-day spa aimed primarily at locals enjoying down time. Come for the sauna and plunge pool and modern onsen, then kick back on a leather lounger in the library to watch the news on a big screen TV, or flick through an artist’s monograph from the shelves. This is also where the treatment rooms are: When you fill out the consultation form, you’re asked for music preferences (but the ‘Tokyo massage’ comes with jazz as a default). The treatments themselves have been developed as proprietorial and are refreshingly different to the cookie-cutter “now turn over for me” massages of most hotel spas. Why aren’t more hotels innovating in this way? Access to the gym and the architecturally magnificent pool on the 47th floor is gratis for all guests.
The décor in the rooms and suites remains pared back.
The bathrooms are decked out with luxury Aesop products.
The city view from the suites is a real selling point.
Explore
Shinjuku has a reputation for debauched nightlife and gangsters, but the hotel is in a dull corner of the area – opposite Shinjuku Central Park. The main station is 15 minutes’ walk away (where you can also see the “only-in-Japan” 3D Giant Cat – a computer-generated tortoiseshell that goes about its feline business all day, high above the east exit of the metro). There are now a few interesting boutiques and cafés on the stretch down to Yoyogi, and on your way you’ll pass one of the most interesting bits of new architecture in the city – Sou Fujimoto’s sculptural white public toilet that looks like Oscar Niemeyer at his most playful.
While most skyscraper hotels are now attached to shopping malls and metro stops, the Park Hyatt would be a disaster without the always available taxis, but it’s still central enough to be totally practical: it’s just an 11-minute ride to the Yohji–Comme–Prada-Miyake stretch of Aoyama and 14 minutes to the bullet trains at Tokyo Station.