The resort truly stands apart from the pack with an unusually well-stocked bookshop filled with tomes on art, design, photography, and architecture.

It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that the resort city of Sanya on Hainan Island has been attracting more than its share of luxury hotel brands. Few, though, have managed to capture the imagination quite as vividly as the crescent-shaped Sanya Edition. For the Asian debut of his Edition brand, Ian Schrager has pulled out all the stops. For starters, he tapped the Singapore-based architects SCDA to create a sleek silhouette of grandly proportioned blocks of gray stone and dark timber that fan out over the sprawling 22-hectare site, which includes an artificial lagoon filled with purified seawater, two swimming pools, and a clutch of restaurants and bars. Schrager’s interior design team, meanwhile, has dressed the calm, capacious rooms—there are 500 in total, plus 17 pool villas—in white stone, pale oak, and wispy ceiling-height drapes that encircle the bed, a theme that’s carried over in the two-story all-white spa. The resort truly stands apart from the pack with an unusually well-stocked bookshop filled with tomes on art, design, photography, and architecture, alongside eye-catching installations and art pieces by contemporary Chinese artists that have been curated by Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

86-898/8835-9999; The Sanya Edition, Hainan Island;
 doubles from US$258