The Next Wave of Luxury Hotel Spas Is Being Built Inside Old Bank Vaults

Two of the more talked-about spas arriving in Europe over the next 18 months will sit in rooms designed to hold money. Four Seasons is putting the spa at its 2027 Berlin hotel inside the former jewel vault of the 19th-century Dresdner Bank headquarters, and Corinthia Rome, which opened in February inside the old Bank of Italy building near the Pantheon, built its spa into the building's original vaults.

Both are symptoms of a broader shift across luxury hospitality: the biggest brands would now rather restore an old building than put up a new one.

Four Seasons calls its versions living landmarks. The recently reopened Danieli in Venice spans three buildings, one of them a 15th-century palazzo. In Cartagena, the brand knitted together a 16th-century Franciscan cloister, a 1920s Beaux-Arts club and a former theatre, and deliberately left the three eras legible rather than smoothing them into one style.

Fairmont says roughly a fifth of its portfolio is in active transformation. It has just opened the Mere in Cheshire, a £125 million redevelopment of a golf and spa resort on an estate recorded in the Domesday Book, and it is converting the former Bank of New Orleans tower, a 31-storey building on the National Register of Historic Places, into Fairmont New Orleans later this year. Fairmont Southampton in Bermuda reopens this autumn after a $550 million investment.

The pattern repeats elsewhere. Rosewood reopened The Chancery Rosewood in London inside the old US Embassy, preserving Eero Saarinen's façade. The Imperial Hotel opened this spring in Kyoto inside a 1936 theatre. W has moved into a 1911 Beaux-Arts insurance building in New York and a rationalist landmark in Florence, and expects 80 percent of its global portfolio to have been updated by 2028.

The reasoning is competitive as much as sentimental. Provenance is the one asset a new build cannot manufacture, and heritage tourism keeps growing: Grand View Research valued the global market at $624.55 billion in 2025 and projects $936.97 billion by 2033. Reusing a structure also avoids demolition waste and the embodied carbon of new construction, though how much depends entirely on the project.