Cover Amankora Gangtey Lodge, one of the design-led hotels in Bhutan, has a timber-clad guest pavilion that glows at dusk with outdoor firepit seating overlooking the Phobjikha Valley
Amankora Gangtey Lodge, one of the design-led hotels in Bhutan, has a timber-clad guest pavilion that glows at dusk with outdoor firepit seating overlooking the Phobjikha Valley
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From Kerry Hill’s rammed earth at Amankora to Zhiwaling’s nail-free joinery, six hotel brands have created design-led hotels in Bhutan while interpreting the same government-mandated architecture code differently
Bhutan’s building code is unusually blunt about what a hotel is allowed to look like. Every commercial structure must conform to traditional architectural guidelines, down to window proportions and roof pitch, as set by the government. For the international hospitality groups that have arrived over the past two decades, this has meant a shared constraint but not a shared outcome.
Aman brought in an Australian modernist who reinterpreted the dzong in stabilised earth. Six Senses splits its offering across five valleys, each reading the vernacular differently. Como enlisted an architect trained by that same Australian modernist to build something even quieter. Meanwhile, a Bhutanese-owned hotel outside Paro spent five years proving that centuries-old joinery techniques could produce something as sophisticated as anything built by an international name. The six hotel brands covered here show how differently “Bhutanese in spirit” can be interpreted within an identical rulebook.
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Amankora
Above Traditional prayer wheels stand outside Amankora Thimphu Lodge’s entrance courtyard
Above Amankora Paro Lodge’s terrace and firepit seating overlook the village below with Drukgyel Dzong and a snow-capped peak in the distance
Traditional prayer wheels stand outside Amankora Thimphu Lodge’s entrance courtyard
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When Kerry Hill Architects began work on Amankora in the early 2000s, the late Australian architect made it clear that he had no intention of replicating Bhutan’s ornate, colourful dzong architecture. His five lodges, spread across Paro, Thimphu, Punakha, Gangtey and Bumthang and completed over roughly fifteen years, are Bhutanese “in spirit” rather than in decoration. The more consequential decision was structural. Traditional Bhutanese buildings use rammed-mud construction, but a major earthquake shortly before the project began ruled it out for a modern hotel. Hill’s solution was stabilised rammed earth, an engineered, earthquake-resistant version of the same material, built by local craftspeople he trained specifically for the project.
Above Amankora Punakha Lodge occupies a whitewashed traditional farmhouse with carved timber window frames and a projecting upper balcony
Above The stabilised rammed-earth facade of an Amankora Paro Lodge suite building sits framed by pine forest
Amankora Punakha Lodge occupies a whitewashed traditional farmhouse with carved timber window frames and a projecting upper balcony
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The result favours restraint over embellishment: whitewashed walls, timber-panelled interiors, custom furnishings inserted as plywood-box volumes within the existing shells. Each lodge is sited to draw out something specific about its valley, whether that is a forest walk, an orchard, or the remains of a ruined fortress at Paro. The architecture has aged into something of a reference point for the country’s later luxury developments. Amankora is among the design-led hotels in Bhutan, built under Hill’s direct supervision rather than by a successor firm, and it remains the only Bhutanese property to hold two Michelin Keys.
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Above A sunken stone firepit lounge at Amankora Bumthang Lodge looks out toward Jakar Dzong at golden hour
Above Amankora Gangtey Lodge’s timber-clad guest pavilion glows at dusk with outdoor firepit seating overlooking the Phobjikha Valley
A sunken stone firepit lounge at Amankora Bumthang Lodge looks out toward Jakar Dzong at golden hour
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Six Senses Bhutan
Above A prayer pavilion floats on the reflecting pools of Six Senses Thimphu with the Paro Valley and surrounding mountains beyond
A prayer pavilion floats on the reflecting pools of Six Senses Thimphu with the Paro Valley and surrounding mountains beyond
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While Amankora reads as a single architectural voice repeated across five sites, Six Senses Bhutan took the opposite approach. Bangkok-based Habita Architects designed each of its five lodges, opened between 2019 and 2020 in Thimphu, Paro, Punakha, Gangtey and Bumthang, as a distinct response to local geography and vernacular building type rather than a consistent brand aesthetic. The Thimphu lodge, nicknamed the Palace in the Sky, takes its stonewashed walls and shingled roof from dzong architecture and sits above reflecting pools that mirror the clouds. Gangtey, by contrast, borrows from Bhutanese farmhouse construction, built from local stone and hand-hewn timber on a cantilevered form that overlooks the valley’s wintering black-necked cranes.
Above The Flying Farmhouse at Six Senses Punakha was inspired by traditional Bhutanese cantilevered architecture, cleverly appearing to hover over the lodge’s infinity pool
Above Six Senses Paro’s stone-and-timber lodge sits beneath the ruins of an old watchtower, framed by the Himalayan foothills
The Flying Farmhouse at Six Senses Punakha was inspired by traditional Bhutanese cantilevered architecture, cleverly appearing to hover over the lodge’s infinity pool
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Punakha’s design responds to its rice terraces, while Paro incorporates an existing sixteenth-century ruin into its spa. The unifying idea, according to the brand, was to let topography and local life generate the design brief for each site individually rather than imposing a single template. It is a more fragmented approach than Aman’s and riskier, but it gives the five-lodge circuit a genuine sense of place-by-place variation. Among design-led hotels in Bhutan, Six Senses is the only one built around five distinct design briefs rather than a single repeated architectural language. Six Senses Bhutan holds one Michelin Key.
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Above A timber-clad villa at Six Senses Bumthang sits tucked among tall pines on the property’s forested slope
Above A suite bedroom at Six Senses Bumthang pairs timber panelling with a daybed positioned to look onto the surrounding pine forest
A timber-clad villa at Six Senses Bumthang sits tucked among tall pines on the property’s forested slope
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Como Uma, Paro and Punakha
Uma Paro’s Bukhari restaurant glows through the pine trees at dusk
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Above A rounded, painted-window turret forms part of Uma Paro’s main building, detailed with traditional Bhutanese woodwork
Above A guest villa at Uma Paro sits among pine trees, its ochre walls and shingled roof reached by a stone path
A rounded, painted-window turret forms part of Uma Paro’s main building, detailed with traditional Bhutanese woodwork
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Como’s two Bhutan lodges were designed by Cheong Yew Kuan, an architect who spent six years at Kerry Hill Architects before founding his own Bali-based practice. The lineage shows: Uma Paro, the earlier and larger of the two properties with 29 rooms, and Uma Punakha, an eleven-room lodge that opened in 2012, both favour the pared-back, light-filled minimalism associated with Hill’s school of tropical modernism over Bhutan’s more decorative dzong tradition.
A villa terrace at Uma Punakha overlooks the forested Mo Chu valley, with a traditional clay incense burner sending up smoke
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At Punakha, Cheong restored an existing multi-storey farmhouse to house the lodge’s public areas rather than building new, and positioned the guest villas on a slope to catch sunrise over the Mo Chu River. Interiors lean on sheesham-wood furniture, earthy tones, and traditional wood-burning stoves, with large windows deliberately placed to draw in natural light and mountain air. It is a quieter design language than Aman’s rammed-earth mass or Six Senses’s valley-by-valley variation, closer to Cheong’s other work for Como, including the Shambhala Estate in Bali. The two lodges are among the more restrained of the design-led hotels in Bhutan, built from timber and stone sourced locally rather than imported materials
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Gangtey Lodge
Gangtey Lodge’s stone-and-timber buildings sit low against the pine-covered slopes of the Phobjikha Valley
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Gangtey Lodge began as a side project. Its owners, Khin Omar Win and Brett Melzer, the founders of Balloons Over Bagan, first visited the Phobjikha Valley in 2003 intending to build a small guesthouse to support hot-air-balloon trips over the area. That plan evolved, over a decade, into a twelve-suite lodge designed by Australian architect Mary Lou Thomson, which opened in 2013 below the valley’s seventeenth-century Gangtey monastery. Thomson’s approach was to treat the traditional Bhutanese farmhouse, rather than the more formal dzong, as the reference point: the building uses exposed stone, hand-cut heated floors and heavy timber framing, with pitched roofs and arched windows drawn from the vernacular architecture of the surrounding farming hamlets.
Arched windows above a freestanding bathtub at Gangtey Lodge look out over the farmed valley floor and forested hills
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A separate bathhouse, built in a similarly plain stone-and-timber style, houses the lodge’s hot stone bath ritual. Inside, the scale shifts from farmhouse to something closer to a grand hunting lodge, with cathedral ceilings and a glass wall in the lounge that frames the entire valley and monastery beyond. The result is a smaller, more domestic reading of Bhutanese architecture than the resort circuits built by Aman or Six Senses, closer in spirit to a well-appointed private house than a hotel campus. Gangtey Lodge holds two Michelin Keys, the same distinction as Amankora, and remains one of the few Bhutan properties designed from the outset around a single site rather than a five-lodge journey.
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Pemako Punakha
Above Pemako Punakha’s timber-and-stone buildings emerge from the Punakha Valley’s tall grass at sunrise
Above A tented villa at Pemako Punakha sits screened by trees, its arched timber windows and stone base echoing dzong construction
Pemako Punakha’s timber-and-stone buildings emerge from the Punakha Valley’s tall grass at sunrise
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Above A lounge at Pemako Punakha centres on a copper lotus fountain beneath a wall of stacked prayer-wheel motifs and striped pendant lamps
Above Carved timber archways and hanging shoulder bags frame the bar at Pemako Punakha, styled in Bill Bensley’s maximalist take on dzong architecture
A lounge at Pemako Punakha centres on a copper lotus fountain beneath a wall of stacked prayer-wheel motifs and striped pendant lamps
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Pemako Punakha, which opened in 2023 on a riverside site in the Punakha Valley, was conceived by the American designer Bill Bensley, known for hospitality projects built around a strong narrative conceit rather than strict architectural restraint. Bensley’s concept treats the property as what he has called an alternate universe rooted in the idea of a beyul, a hidden sanctuary from Tibetan Buddhist belief, with guests arriving on foot across a prayer-flag-strung footbridge and a constructed waterfall before reaching the property’s 21 tented villas.
Bill Bensley’s arched windows and striped Ara Bar lamps frame the Mo Chu River at Pemako Punakha’s restaurant
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The design leans into dzong-derived motifs, orange, yellow, white and black drawn from the national flag, staircases arranged around stupa-like central forms that encourage guests to walk around rather than through them, and interiors that mix Bhutanese antiques with contemporary tented-camp construction. An existing farmhouse on the site, older than the resort itself, was restored rather than replaced and now serves as one of its restaurants. Pemako’s ownership group markets itself as Bhutan’s first homegrown luxury hotel brand, and its sister property in Thimphu is currently undergoing a renovation led by P49 Design, with a third property in Paro announced for 2029 in partnership with Bjarke Ingels Group.
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Zhiwaling Heritage
Hand-painted murals and carved timber balconies wrap Zhiwaling Heritage’s stone facade, built without a single nail
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Zhiwaling Heritage is the only Bhutanese-owned five-star hotel in the country and one of the few design-led hotels in Bhutan built without an outside architect. The main structure was assembled without a single nail. Constructed over five years by more than sixty local artisans, the hotel follows the same joinery techniques used historically in Bhutan’s dzong fortresses, with hand-carved timber beams, cornices and columns produced entirely by hand rather than machined off-site. The property, set on ten acres in the Paro Valley, houses its 45 suites across a main building and eight cottages, each named for one of the Eight Lucky Signs of Buddhist iconography.
Above A suite at Zhiwaling Heritage combines timber-beamed ceilings with carved window surrounds and a private balcony overlooking the pines
Above Zhiwaling Heritage’s indoor pool sits beneath a timber-beamed ceiling, framed by dry-stone walls and floor-to-ceiling windows onto the garden
A suite at Zhiwaling Heritage combines timber-beamed ceilings with carved window surrounds and a private balcony overlooking the pines
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Its most striking architectural feature is arguably not new at all: the Royal Raven Suite houses a private shrine built from reclaimed timbers salvaged from a monastery that is roughly 450 years old. Where the international operators on this list brought outside architects to interpret Bhutanese form, Zhiwaling inverted the process, with a local businessman commissioning Bhutanese craftspeople to build according to their own traditions rather than a foreign firm’s reading of them. It was named to National Geographic’s Unique Lodges of the World in 2015, the only Bhutan property to receive the distinction.
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Jennifer Choo is Regional Managing Editor of Tatler Homes, covering architecture, interior design, and art across Asia. Based in Malaysia, she oversees regional content on luxury residential design and contemporary art collections. Legally trained but choosing to pursue her passion for design, she previously led notable design publications and worked as an interior stylist and art consultant for property developers, design firms, and private clients.
