Top 5 World's most beautifully designed spas

1. Verdura Golf & Spa Resort
Sciacca, Italy

 
Hotelier Rocco Forte opened the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort, a 568-acre mecca of rest and relaxation, in 2010, bringing a new level of Mediterranean luxe to a private stretch of beach on Sicily’s southwest coast. For the holistic spa, which recently launched one- and two-week-long Vita Health wellness retreats, Italian architect Flavio Albanese, a former editor of European design bible Domus, collaborated with Forte’s sister and the brand’s director of design, Olga Polizzi, to create some 40,000 square feet of indoor-outdoor space. Inspired by the region’s vernacular architecture, the pair arranged a series of minimalist, local tufo stone–and-glass pavilions (containing treatment rooms, a double-height hammam, and a 25-meter pool) around seawater-filled thalassotherapy pools (shown) that overlook the resort’s golf courses and, beyond, the Caltabellotta mountains.

2. Vinothérapie SPA Caudalie Marqués de Riscal
Elciego, Spain
 
Post–Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frank Gehry returned to northern Spain to create the Hotel Marqués de Riscal, a Luxury Collection hotel and spa and a jubilant shot of dynamic contemporary design amid the rolling vineyards of the Rioja Alavesa wine region. Gehry used some 30,000 square feet of titanium to create the ruffled roofline—whose energetic waves evoke a flamenco dancer’s skirts—and created a glass passage that leads to the spa, designed by architect Yves Collet. There, the Bordeaux, France–based Caudalie offers the relaxing, rejuvenating—and, in some cases, even slimming—wine- and grape-based wellness treatments that the brand originally perfected in its home country.

3.  The Spa at the Viceroy Miami Hotel
Miami, Fla.
 
Just when you think you’ve seen it all from design’s ageless enfant terrible, Philippe Starck continues to surprise. Recombining some of his signature set pieces—oversize mirrors, brightly colored crystal chandeliers, and haute-French furniture—the master of whimsical pastiche debuted this 28,000-square-foot fantasy of a spa and fitness center at the Viceroy Miami in December 2008, on the 15th floor of an Arquitectonica-designed downtown Miami skyscraper. The double-height, library-like “water lounge” (shown), with its plunge pools of various temperatures and floor-to-ceiling views of Biscayne Bay, proves the most jaw-dropping spot among many.

4. Espace Vitalité Chenot
Erbusco, Italy
At this five-month-old boutique retreat in the Selman hotel, located just beyond the Medina, master designer—and Marrakech devotee (see La Mamounia, slide 10)—Jacques Garcia took inspiration from the East. He arranged the hammam-like spa’s seven rooms around a serene, naturally lit square pool (shown) and employed carved wooden screens and perforated vaulted ceilings to create an intriguing interplay between darkness, shadow, and light. Garcia combined all of this with artisanal Moroccan brick-, tile- and plasterwork, but the spa’s treatments are hardly those of local tradition; instead, the hotel has imported the coveted antiaging medi-spa methods of Frenchman Dr. Henri Chenot.

5.  Armani/SPA, Armani Hotel Milano
Milan, Italy
Conceived by Giorgio Armani himself, the spa at Milan’s newest high-fashion hotel—only the second Armani hotel, the first being in the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—exhibits the crisply cool, tautly tailored, and handsomely masculine minimalism for which the Italian designer is rightfully renowned. Its nearly 11,000-square-foot perch, on the hotel’s eighth floor, affords the most striking of views out over the city, especially from the heated relaxation pool (shown), the perfect place to prepare for, or extend the pleasures of, a treatment.

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