Amankora Thimphu

Amankora Thimphu sits above the city in the Motithang district, inside a forest of blue pine that the Aman lodges throughout Bhutan return to again and again as a setting. The building takes the form of a dzong, the fortress architecture that governs so much of what gets built in this country, with thick rammed earth walls and wooden framed windows required of anything constructed at this scale. Kerry Hill, the architect behind all five Amankora lodges, worked within those same rules everywhere, and the family resemblance across the collection is real, though each lodge answers to its own landscape.

The sixteen suites are a single combined living and sleeping space, a king bed set beside a reading chair and a window banquette, with the traditional bukhari stove positioned between the bedroom and the bathroom, where a terrazzo tub waits for the evening. It is the smallest of the Amankora lodges set closest to a capital city, and despite that proximity it does not feel urban once you are inside the trees.

The location is the point. Thimphu’s museums, its market, its dzong and its shops are a short drive down the hill, while the lodge itself stays quiet, wrapped in pine, removed enough that returning to it after a day in the city feels like leaving somewhere busier behind.