Amangiri Review: The Sandstone and the Stars

The Colorado Plateau’s specific geology — the Navajo sandstone deposited two hundred and fifty million years ago, exposed by the erosion that the Colorado River and the wind have been conducting ever since, and coloured in the specific spectrum of ochre and rust and cream that the iron oxide content of each layer produces — is the material from which Amangiri was built and the landscape that Amangiri inhabits, and the decision to use the one as the building material for the other is the most architecturally honest decision the architects Marwan Al-Sayed, Wendell Burnette, and Rick Joy made in the project’s design. The building is the canyon’s material. The canyon is the building’s context. The relationship between the two is as complete as architecture achieves in any landscape.

The resort opened in 2009 in Canyon Point, Utah — a location chosen for its position on the Colorado Plateau at the geological convergence of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and the canyon country whose specific light and specific emptiness the Aman brand identified as the American equivalent of the Rajasthani desert’s qualities that its Indian properties inhabit. The specific quality of the Amangiri location — the silence that the distance from any highway produces, the darkness that the absence of any nearby community allows at night, and the specific colour of the sandstone in the last twenty minutes of the day when the sun drops toward the canyon rim and the ochre intensifies toward the specific deep orange that no other hour produces — is the environment that the Aman brand had been looking for in the American West for years before the Canyon Point site made the project possible.

The Night Sky

The International Dark-Sky Association has designated the region around Amangiri as one of the darkest sky areas in the continental United States — a designation based on the measurable absence of light pollution that the distance from any significant human settlement and the National Monument’s development restrictions together produce. The specific consequence is a night sky of the quality that most guests have not experienced since childhood, if they grew up outside the city, or have never experienced, if they did not: the Milky Way as a physical presence rather than a concept, the naked-eye resolution of the galactic structure that the photographs of the Milky Way produce and that the eye confirms when the conditions are this dark, and the specific silence in which the sky is observed — the canyon’s acoustics absorbing rather than reflecting the sounds of the desert night — that makes the sky the dominant sensory experience rather than one among several.

The outdoor bath on the suite terrace, positioned above the canyon floor in the specific orientation that makes the night sky the ceiling — the bath is open to the air, the bath’s warmth against the desert night’s cool providing the thermal context for the extended sky observation that a cold outdoor bath would not — is the most specifically romantic feature of any American resort and the reason that Amangiri’s suite has been described as the most romantic room in the United States by publications whose criteria for the assessment include both the architecture and the experience of spending the night in it.

The Architecture

The building wraps around a natural sandstone outcropping that the architects found on the site and built the pool platform around rather than excavating. This decision — to accommodate the rock rather than remove it — produced the central image of the Amangiri: the pool wrapping around the sandstone butte, the water appearing to emerge from the rock rather than being placed beside it, and the specific visual quality of a pool whose far edge is the canyon and whose near edge is the ancient stone. The pool photographs that circulate in the international luxury hotel conversation use this rock as their primary element, and arriving at the pool for the first time and recognising the rock from the photographs — and finding it larger, and more orange, and more present than the photographs suggested — is the Amangiri arrival’s most specific pleasure.

The Spa

The spa — the Aman Spa, as the brand designates its spa facilities — is built into the cliff face below the main building, with the treatment rooms in the specific cool and quiet that the sandstone’s thermal mass produces. The spa’s signature treatments draw from the Navajo healing tradition in the collaborative relationship that the resort has maintained with the surrounding indigenous community since the property’s founding: the herbal wraps using the plateau’s native plants, the sand ceremonies that the Navajo tradition uses for healing and ceremony, and the specific body work that the desert culture’s physical intelligence has developed over generations of living in and with this landscape. These are not decorative cultural references. They are genuine collaborative uses of traditional knowledge conducted with the community’s participation and consent.

Practical Details

34 suites. Room-only rates. Adults-only. Rates from approximately $3,000-$4,000 per night. Page Municipal Airport approximately 15 minutes. Las Vegas McCarran Airport approximately 4 hours by road. The resort’s remoteness is structural — the 4-hour drive from Las Vegas or the charter flight to Page are the access options. Book the outdoor bath suite specifically; not all suites have the outdoor bath in the same orientation to the night sky.