Hotels Into The Wild: Utah’s Amangiri

A love letter to light, written in concrete. Everything everyone says about Amangiri is true. Including the fact that it is impossible to get a room. Part hotel, part art installation, Amangiri is a luminous place of startling beauty, but also ridiculously fun. The swimming pool wraps itself around a rock 164-million-years old, the clouds above are pink, and cowboys on horses trail across the distant desert for hours, the dust kicking up behind them like half-formed thoughts. But here also, a short drive away, are beautiful slot canyons like deep tunnels of melted rock, and Lake Powell, the iridescent flooded canyonland where there’s doughnutting behind speed boats driven by blond boys called Chad.

Brilliant for families, but also, with its terrace fires and rooftop beds open to the clang of crashing stars, absurdly romantic, Amangiri manages to be all things to all people. And yet while the freshness and lightness of touch is remarkable, its staff superlative and the green juice certainly the freshest you’ll find in the tri-state area, it is the design that has everyone wide-eyed and exhilarated. Like being inside a living James Turrell sculpture where the shades of the world are hyper-realised, Amangiri seems to exist in some parallel – and wildly more spectacular – universe.