St Regis San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

The St Regis Hotel is a striking design hotel, appropriately next door to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s a walk to the Montgomery Street BART and Muni station, within walking distance of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sony Metreon mall and the Union Square shopping district, as well as a good selection of galleries, clubs and independent bookstores.

The design hotel has a streamlined style reliant upon its white-themed minimalism. Three commissioned public art installations have taken place at St Regis, and with 22,500 square feet of space for indoor and outdoor events, it is a prime place for expositions and conferences.

The facilities

Breakfast can be taken on the fourth floor restaurant Vitrine, while lunch and dinner are served at Ame, at lobby-level. The design hotel's celebratedrestaurant Ame offers great modern American/Asian cuisine to guests. Ame operates under chef Hiro Sone and his wife, pastry chef Lissa Doumani; together their culinary forces combined to earn it a Times ranking as one of the Top 40 Restaurants in the U.S. (2004).

The restaurant shares a roof with the 9,000-square-foot Remède spa, which offers ten treatment rooms, custom-made treatments based on its own skincare line, and as an added bonus, champagne and truffles come on arrival for treatments.

A 3,700-square-foot gym has a full selection of cardio equipment with built-in LCD televisions. Also iPods are available for guest use, as well as a fifty-foot lap pool, yoga room, and weights area.

The rooms

St. Regis has a 41-story tower comprised of 260 guestrooms and 46 suites, as well as 102 residents. Amenities include nightstand touch-screen control (of lighting, shades, alarm clock), recessed plasma TVs, CD/DVD player, motorized curtains internet access, and laptop and cell phone chargers. The rooms at the design hotel also feature white Pratesi linens, pillowtop mattresses and cream-colored chaise lounges, some come with fantastic views of downtown. Bathrooms feature deep soaking tubs, rain shower heads, Acqua di Parma bath products and exceptionally soft Cypress terry towels and robes.