# Twelve Hotel Pools Worth Booking the Whole Trip Around > A rooftop 57 floors above Singapore, a floating island in Lake Como, and a pool in Monaco that Karl Lagerfeld designed. - Source: Star Life - Canonical URL: https://starlife.channel/article/best-hotel-pools-in-the-world - Author: Iris Bellamy - Section: Living - Published: 2026-08-18T13:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-18T13:00:00.000Z - Tags: Hotels, Travel, Swimming Pools, Design --- Few things settle the quality of a hotel faster than its pool. The right one produces escape and possibility on sight. The wrong one, wedged in beside the car park, quietly undoes everything else the hotel has been trying to do. The pools below are destinations on their own terms, where the setting, the architecture and the service all arrive at the same moment. Some run toward the Mediterranean and one hangs over Singapore. What they have in common is the sense of having got somewhere. ## Marina Bay Sands, Singapore One of the most photographed pools anywhere, 57 storeys up, laid across the roof like a ribbon suspended over the city. Palm trees and loungers take some of the edge off the futurism, and the vanishing edge handles the rest. From the water the skyline appears to keep going, and it looks as though you could swim straight off into it. ## Lake Como Three pools at this Como institution, and only one of them stays with you afterwards: the floating pool, an aquatic island set directly into the lake itself. The aquamarine water reads sharply against the darker blue around it, with the mountains standing up behind. ## Amangiri, Utah Some pools blend into the landscape. This one looks as though it was cut out of it. The main pool wraps around an enormous sandstone escarpment in the southern Utah desert, and the result is cinematic and close to monastic at the same time. An hour spent floating there is less swimming than sitting quietly with the desert. ## Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Antibes Carved into the rock above the sea and part of the hotel's mythology for more than a century. Cliffs, blue water, terraces under umbrellas. There is no purer version of the Cote d'Azur fantasy on offer anywhere. ## Le Bristol, Paris The argument for indoor pools, made properly. It sits on the sixth floor, where the naval architect Casar Pinnau built it to echo the bow of a yacht from the 1920s, with teak underfoot, a painted stern in trompe l'oeil and birds and butterflies overhead. Floor to ceiling windows take in the rooftops and the Eiffel Tower, and the solarium next door faces Montmartre. ## Hotel Fasano, Rio de Janeiro Philippe Starck designed it and kept it deliberately spare, because the view is the entire point: Ipanema directly below and the Dois Irmaos mountains beyond it. Elegant without being self important, which is rarer than it sounds. ## The Silo, Cape Town On top of a historic grain silo that now houses the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art. Panoramic views over the city, and the weight of the building's history sitting underneath you while you swim. ## The Retreat at Blue Lagoon, Iceland A pool usually implies sunshine. This one makes the case for steam, snow and mineral blue water framed by black volcanic rock. It is the closest thing available to swimming somewhere other than this planet. ## The Surf Club, Miami Adults only, set into gardens under coconut palms, and pointedly quiet by the standards of the city around it. The ocean and Miami are both within reach and neither is permitted to intrude. ## Hotel Metropole, Monaco Karl Lagerfeld designed this one. It sits behind a row of palms and cypresses a short walk from Casino Square, and carries 18 backlit engraved glass panels tracing the voyage of Ulysses across the Mediterranean. Monaco glamour with a sense of theatre attached. ## Beaverbrook, Surrey Better known this month as the setting for one of the Zendaya and Tom Holland wedding celebrations. Close to London, extremely private, with a spa, serious food and a long political history behind it. The pool sits among the grounds with a chequerboard floor that is asking to be photographed. ## Miramonti, the Dolomites A saltwater infinity pool that functions as a private viewing platform for the Alps. It is heated all year, so it takes the skiing season and the hiking season equally, and a drink is never particularly far away. --- Originally published by Star Life. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://starlife.channel/article/best-hotel-pools-in-the-world.