RYSE, Autograph Collection

Michaelis Boyd clad the lift core at RYSE in concrete slabs of different textures, after the Korean landscape, and laid a pink resin floor around it for the neighbourhood. The tower went up on Yanghwa-ro in 2018, twenty floors of glass in place of a high-rise business hotel, and has let other trades in: a Carhartt WIP flagship and Blue Bottle Coffee on the ground floor, an art gallery in the basement. Each of the 272 rooms is built around a piece from the hotel's own art collection. In one bedroom it is three clusters of brown and black on paper, over a blue headboard tufted in channels, with a copper lamp either side. In a suite lounge a record player sits on a wood cabinet with records in the cubbyholes below, across from a green and orange sofa and a mural in mint and peach.

Recommended for grown-ups who have come to Seoul for Hongdae, its indie clubs and weekend markets, rather than for the palaces across the city. The distances are short: the Gyeongui Line Forest Park in Yeonnam-dong is about eight minutes on foot, and the Hongdae Free Market at Hongik Children's Park about fifteen. Hongik University station is four minutes' walk, on Line 2 and the Airport Railroad, which puts Gimpo about twenty minutes away by subway. Dinner can stay in the building, at CHARR on the fourth floor, where the cooking is Korean fusion off a charcoal grill, and the last drink belongs at Side Note Club on the fifteenth, with records and the skyline: the one view of Hongdae that needs no walking.