Hotel28 Myeongdong

Shin Young-kyun trained at Seoul National University's dental school and practised as a dentist before he went into films, where he did rather better. Red Muffler, in 1964, won him best actor at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival and is still reckoned his best-known film. His hotel is the Myeongdong Securities Building of the early 1970s, renovated and extended, and the cinema runs through all of it. A film camera on its tripod has a red velvet curtain to itself. On the fifth floor the Founder's Gallery keeps the trophies beside Korean film posters of the 1950s and 1960s. The Corner Suite is quieter about it: tan walls, a black-and-white photograph over the bed, a freestanding bath behind glass. The Director's Suite goes the other way. It takes its idea from a director's chair Hermès gave Shin for his part in Korean film, and Hermès furnished it, down to chairs by Enzo Mari. A long way from the dentist's chair.

Recommended for couples who mean to see central Seoul on foot, and for families, with a Family Twin that sleeps four and children under seven staying free. The hotel is on a side street off Myeongdong's main shopping strip, and Gyeongbokgung Palace is a mile's walk north. Congdu Myeongdong, on the sixth floor, cooks modern Korean for six private dining rooms and does no dinner on Sundays. The library on the third floor has a projector and seats ten to twelve, which is a small house for a hotel built round the cinema.