The Murray Hong Kong

The Murray Building was drawn to keep the sun off the civil servants inside. Ron Phillips, a British modernist working with the Public Works Department, set each window deep in the concrete at 45 degrees, so the offices had the daylight without the heat. The government moved out in 2011, and Foster + Partners made it a hotel of 336 rooms, every one turned to the sawtooth of the facade. They are pale panelling and charcoal grey, with green in the cushions, and from some the window frames a wooded hillside with towers climbing it. At the foot of the block, arches four storeys high lift it off the street. Cars used to wind up a ramp behind them to a parking deck; the ramp is a walkway now, and the deck has been pulled back to free a protected cotton tree, about 120 years old, that had been poking up through a hole in it. On Cotton Tree Drive, that was the least it was owed.

Recommended for anyone who wants Central's architecture with a park for a neighbour, and for families: every room above the Superior takes two children as well as two adults. Instead of a kids club there are Hong Kong Park and the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, both reached directly from the hotel, and the Peak Tram's lower terminus is a few minutes' walk. The hotel runs tours of its own years as government offices, and keeps an indoor pool on the lower ground floor. Popinjays, the Italian restaurant and bar, has the roof, where the machinery used to be, with glass from floor to ceiling and the HSBC building lit up beyond it: after half a century of angled windows, the top floor looks the city straight in the eye.