Most of Canada's grand hotels ask you to admire the past. The Fairmont Pacific Rim asks you to admire the present, and it is one of the very few in the country that can pull it off. From the moment the revolving door releases you into a lobby where a DJ is more likely than a harpist and a wall of contemporary art sets the tone, this is a hotel making an argument about how modern luxury should feel. I have stayed here in three different seasons, testing whether the style survives contact with a rainy Tuesday. It does.

The building's trump card is the water. It stands on Canada Place, so the harbour, the seaplanes and the North Shore mountains are laid out beneath you, and the seawall begins almost at the door. My harbour-view room was, as one guest put it plainly, "stunning" — handsomely designed, properly equipped, and with the kind of bed you resent leaving. The service is the other headline: prompt room service, staff who remembered my name by the second morning, and a warmth that a five-star address does not always bother to cultivate.

The rooftop, the spa, the table

The rooftop pool is the hotel's social heart — heated, cabana-lined, and improbably serene given the city below — and it is matched by a Willow Stream Spa that guests single out as a genuine highlight rather than a box ticked. Downstairs, Botanist is one of Vancouver's most assured restaurants, and the Lobby Lounge RawBar hums with a crowd that is half hotel guest, half local. That last detail matters: a hotel the neighbourhood actually uses is a hotel that is alive, and the Pacific Rim is very much alive.

This is contemporary luxury with the confidence not to shout — the art, the water and the service doing the talking.

Where the shine dulls

I hold five-star hotels to their own billing, and here the friction is almost entirely financial. The on-site extras are steep even by luxury standards; more than one guest called the room-service pricing "eye-watering," and a few final bills arrived higher than expected. On a busy night, lobby noise — the very buzz that makes the place feel current — can carry upward later than a light sleeper would like, and one guest felt the service, for the money, dipped to merely good. These are not failings of character so much as of consistency, and at this altitude consistency is the whole game.

How to stay well here

Book a harbour view — the city-side rooms are lovely but miss the point of the address. Treat the spa and the rooftop as reasons to arrive early rather than afterthoughts, settle any room-service habit against a clear head, and ask for a higher floor if late-night lobby energy is not your idea of a lullaby. Do that and the Pacific Rim is close to faultless.