With two world-class sights, Sydney’s Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge, right outside its windows, it may not be an exaggeration to claim the Shangri-La Hotel, Sydney offers the world’s best hotel views. More than 90 percent of the 565 rooms offer water vistas and those rooms are so comfortable and well-designed they almost give the views a run for the money.

Recently renovated, in satisfying palettes of brown and blue or beige and gray in the upper Horizon Club floors, the spaces are devised “to offer every possible amenity” —giant beds with silky linens, free WiFi, roomy wooden consoles, compartmentalized drawers providing extras from tape/markers/staplers in the desk to wine glasses/openers/cups for refreshments to flashlights in the bed table stands along with copies of Lost Horizon, the book about paradise and serenity that inspired the Shangri-La name.

Even guidebooks gush over the views from the 36^th-floor Bar Blu, serving cocktails starting at 5 p.m. Six days a week the Altitude Restaurant is open for formal dinners with seasonal, locally based cuisine and wines to match the menu. Fresh and diverse dishes — hot, sweet, sour and green papaya salad or black pepper beef short rib with crispy rice — are offered after the elaborate breakfast buffet at Cafe Mix. Afternoon tea presented in the Lobby Bar and outdoor terrace features elaborate pastries concocted by the hotel’s noted creative pastry chef, Anna Polyviou.

If the harbor views induce you to take a swim, the pool, sauna and Jacuzzi on the second floor are open 6 a.m.–9 p.m.; the nearby fitness room never closes. The chain’s Chi Spa offers individual and double “spa within a spa” candle-lit suites for rescue release, hot stone or Chakra healing massages.

Guests signing on for the Horizon Club rate are treated to lavish complimentary breakfast, tea and cocktail repasts in the spectacular club room with four-story-high windows overlooking that world-class view.

Shangri-La Hotel, Sydney

176 Cumberland St.
The Rocks
Sydney, NSW 2000
Australia
tel 61 2 9250 6250