The World’s Most Peaceful Hotels With Bathhouses

The Tranquil Traveller

Nishimuraya Honkan is a ryokan of more than 150 years in Kinosaki Onsen, a willow-lined hot-spring town on the San'in coast. It has its own indoor and garden baths, but the real ritual is the town itself: guests change into yukata and wooden geta and walk between Kinosaki's seven public bathhouses in the evening, bath-hopping from one to the next. Back at the inn, tatami rooms look onto clipped Japanese gardens, dinner is kaiseki served privately and built around Tajima beef and winter snow crab, and the day ends in a last quiet soak. It runs to traditional Japanese rhythms, with early dinner and futon on tatami.

Location

Kinosaki Onsen, Japan

Tranquility Index

88 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Zaborin is a contemporary ryokan hidden in birch forest at Hanazono in Niseko, and its whole design turns on the bath. Each of the 15 freestanding villas has both an indoor and an open-air onsen, fed by natural volcanic springs, so you never share a bath or wait for an opening time. The villas are angled so the baths look out at Mount Yotei or the forest and not at each other, and the only shared spaces are a quiet library lounge and the dining room, where dinner is a fixed Kita-Kaiseki menu drawn from Hokkaido's larder. Outside there is only woodland, meadow and mountain.

Location

Hokkaido, Japan

Tranquility Index

95 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

The Retreat is built into an 800-year-old lava field on the edge of Iceland's Blue Lagoon, and it comes with its own section of the mineral-rich, milky-blue water, kept separate and mostly silent while the public baths next door stay busy. Guests can slip straight from the hotel into the lagoon. The subterranean spa is carved into the lava, with a steam cave, a cold well, in-water massages and a slow ritual through geothermal seawater, silica and algae. The suites are floor-to-ceiling glass onto moss and rock. There is little to do beyond the water, so it works best as a two or three-night bathing stop within a wider Iceland trip.

Location

Grindavik, Iceland

Tranquility Index

93 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Amanemu is an Aman onsen resort on a forested hillside in Ise-Shima National Park, looking over the calm, island-dotted waters of Ago Bay. Every one of the 24 suites has its own onsen fed by natural mineral water, so the first move on arrival is usually into the bath. The 2,000-square-metre spa extends the idea with a large communal onsen, two private bathing pavilions and a watsu pool, all fed from the same hot springs. The Kerry Hill buildings are low and dark-timbered, the mood is hushed, and the days are built around soaking and slow meals rather than sightseeing, though the Ise Grand Shrine is within reach.

Location

Ise-Shima, Japan

Tranquility Index

92 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

7132 Hotel exists because of the baths next door. Peter Zumthor built the 7132 Thermal Baths in 1996 from 60,000 slabs of local Vals quartzite, a dim, stone-heavy space of pools at different temperatures meant for slow, near-silent bathing. Staying in the hotel buys you the thing day visitors cannot have: the baths outside public hours, early and late, when they are close to empty. The hotel itself is a design pilgrimage, with compact House of Architects rooms by Zumthor, Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma and Thom Mayne, in a remote farming village at the head of an alpine valley. There is little else to do here beyond the water, the mountains and a two-Michelin-star dinner, which is the appeal.

Location

Vals, Switzerland

Tranquility Index

83 / 100