‘Like flying over Tokyo in a private jet’: Bulgari Hotels lands in Japan

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Tokyo

For many years, when the emphasis of travel to Japan was business rather than tourism, the choice of high-end luxury hotels in Tokyo was curiously limited given the size and wealth of the capital. Now, in the Bulgari, it has a gleaming gold standard that sits at the very top of the market.

All the good hotels in Tokyo, given the ongoing surge in tourist arrivals, have become more expensive, in some cases eye-wateringly so. After 20 years of fighting falling prices, inflation is back in Japan, and tourists exploiting the 34-year weakness of the yen are a powerful tailwind. In the first four months of 2024, Japan received almost 12 million visitors, or roughly double what it received in all of 2004. Some establishments that used to offer a night’s stay for around $300 per night are now able to charge around twice or even three times that amount, depending on the season, which has put many business travellers out of budgetary reach of once standard stops like the Four Seasons, Okura and the Mandarin Oriental.

But the Bulgari, which opened its doors last year, deliberately set itself as above the rest, even before the most recent surge in prices. It has pitched itself as the ultimate choice for the globetrotter coming to Tokyo to shop, eat and be pampered, with basic rooms priced at roughly ¥280,000 ($1,780/£1,400) per night.

Design

One central joy of the Bulgari is its location starting on the 40th floor of one of Tokyo’s tallest and newest towers: the Midtown Yaesu just across the road from Tokyo Station. On one side are exceptional, uninterrupted views across the Imperial Palace and (on a clear day) over to Mount Fuji; on the other, the stunning view across Tokyo Bay — each changing dramatically from day and night, from sunrise over the city to a bird’s-eye view of its twinkling skyline. Other high-end hotels (notably the Ritz-Carlton, the Andaz and the Four Seasons) have taken the top floors of skyscrapers, but none has taken advantage as effectively. 

The hotel was designed by Milan-based architecture firm ACPV, which works on all of the brand’s hotels, and the fundamental vibe of the whole place, from the indulgent Bulgari Dolci chocolatier to the sumptuousness of the rooms themselves, is that it’s beyond ordinary reach. It requires you first to imagine the marble- and gilt-swabbed villa of an Italian billionaire, and then what might happen if that person embraced Japanese minimalism and restraint, an endlessly critical eye for detail and a staff that would make a Toyota assembly line look slapdash. The whole offering is underpinned with epic grace and service in Italo-Japanese balance. It is no coincidence: in the months that preceded its opening, the Bulgari was rumoured to have been recruiting the best, and most highly trained staff from around Tokyo’s other top hotels — a necessary coup in a city whose service sector is now in chronic people drought. 

Rooms

It is the mix of the dolce vita and the detailed that extends the length of the long corridors and into the rooms. These are, again, deliberate zones of perfection: reasonably (though not excessively) sized by Tokyo standards but designed to instantly feel, upon entering, that you have walked into a bedroom you might have put together in your own home. Provided, that is, you had given yourself years to make everything just so, shopped at the finest Italian fabric makers and furniture shops, and deployed top-notch Japanese carpenters to fix the decor. 

There is a lot of orange, a lot of saffron and a golden, kimono fabric bedspread that one feels Ennio Morricone might have slumped on to after a long day composing. Cushions come in silky abundance, atop a bed that wants to be a cloud. It is cosy and homely without feeling remotely quaint or cluttered. The bathroom continues the combination of modern homeliness and bristles with the high end grooming products that beg to be taken home, including a beautiful wooden-handed razor.

The suites may have bigger concessions to the business of earning enough money to stay here, but generally, it all exists to assure you that you are not there for work. The minibar is filled with the sort of champagney, artisanal bon-bons and handcrafted biscuit luxuries with which James Bond would stock the boot of his Aston Martin to picnic a contessa; very much not the Pringles and 7-Up that fuel an effort to finish a PowerPoint before tomorrow’s conference.

The rooms are also surprisingly well soundproofed, meaning that there is eerily no noise from the corridors, but even more disarmingly, not a peep from the staggering expanse of city laid out below. The whole effect is like flying over Tokyo in a private jet.

Amenities

Almost uniquely for Tokyo, the Bulgari makes brilliant use of its height with large, multi-tiered outdoor spaces and even a wide wooden balcony if your personal trainer decides to take your gym session outdoors. The gym itself is another triumph — high-ceilinged, vast-windowed and with the machinery positioned so that the view takes your mind off any strain. 

On first entering the spa area, the visitor sees a prow-of-a-superyacht arrangement of swimming pool and daybeds but set against a vast window looking down imperiously on the planet’s biggest city. Turn a corner to the smaller “vitality pool” and there (as elsewhere around the hotel) is the reassurance that you are in the embrace of the brand you are paying for. A gold, green and bronze mosaic extends to the ceiling and a waterfall spews from the word BVLGARI. This design, says the hotel, is inspired by the fan-shaped Caracalla baths of ancient Rome. This wasn’t how Tokyo used to roll, but maybe now it does.

Food and drink

Elsewhere, the Bulgari Bar is a thing of particular supremacy: an airy, impeccably designed Italian-style living room that extends outside to a sprawling terrace that simultaneously feels welcoming and aloof. The view beyond the terrace is, once again, stellar, but is actually eclipsed in this instance by the glass mosaic behind the bar, which depicts a garden of trees and birds.

The hotel has a fine Italian restaurant but the standout culinary highlight, meanwhile, pulls a different trick — that of making an eight-seat sushi restaurant under the direction of Kenji Gyoten, one of the country’s greatest, three-Michelin-star chefs, feel like it sits casually on the fringes of a quiet Kyoto garden. And yet, these seem to belong firmly to the clientele of the Bulgari, rather than to Tokyo as a whole. For all the magnificence of its bar and the Bulgari’s main restaurant, neither has yet emerged as the city’s most hotly desired spots for exclusive dining or drinking.

But that may also be the point. This is a hotel designed for people who need to know, deep down, that nobody else in town is staying somewhere better. It is for people who require reminders of opulence and the sensation of extreme carpet depth en route from room to spa to cocktail bar. It is a cocoon of lavishness for those who find themselves stranded in a city famous for understatement and wealth concealment. The Bulgari is indisputably extraordinary: as much for what it offers as for what it says about how vastly Tokyo’s hotel market has changed in recent years.

Leo Lewis was a guest of Bulgari Hotel Tokyo