Four Seasons Hotel Seoul Opens in Gwanghwamun

Four Seasons Hotel Seoul opened in October 2015 in Gwanghwamun, the historic and administrative centre of the Korean capital. It has 317 rooms, of which 32 are suites, in a new tower a few minutes’ walk from Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main square and City Hall. It was the first hotel in Korea for the Canadian group.

The building is by the Korean practice Heerim, and the interiors were divided among three designers. LTW Designworks, from Singapore, was responsible for the rooms and the main public spaces, which use pale stone, bronze screens and references to traditional Korean houses and to bojagi, the patchwork wrapping cloth. André Fu designed the Cantonese restaurant, and AvroKO, from New York, the Italian restaurant and the bars. More than 160 works by contemporary artists, most of them Korean, hang through the hotel.

It opened with an ambitious set of restaurants and bars. Yu Yuan serves Cantonese food and Peking duck in a room inspired by Shanghai in the 1920s; it later received a Michelin star. Boccalino is Italian, Kioku was Japanese and has since been replaced by a restaurant of the chef Akira Back, and The Market Kitchen is a buffet set over a glass floor that shows archaeological remains found during construction. Below the lobby, behind an unmarked door, is Charles H., a bar named after the American writer Charles H. Baker, which became one of the best known in Asia.

The wellness floors include a spa with seven treatment rooms, an indoor pool, and a fitness club of 765 square metres with Korean saunas of the kind found in a jjimjilbang, a rarity in an international hotel.

Seoul’s leading hotels had until then been Korean-owned, among them The Shilla. Four Seasons was followed by Signiel Seoul in 2017 and by a group of new hotels in Gangnam. Its position north of the river remains its advantage for visitors who come for the palaces, museums and old neighbourhoods. The hotel has since worked with Korean brands on stays such as its partnership with Sulwhasoo.