Spring Boot Best approach for validation in facade

I use Spring Boot with Kotlin and my project is splitted on modules where I have application layer with REST controllers and facades, domain layer with services and business logic and infrastructures layer for communication with external services or DBs. I think (but I can be wrong) that the best place for basic validation like notNull, notEmpty, max and min, size etc. is facade because both REST controllers and another modules communicate with it, but the problem is that javax validation annotation like @Valid are working only on REST Controller layer (in classes with annotation @RestController) and when I try to create some tests for this facade then fields with wrong values return NullPointerException instead of MethodArgumentNotValidException. I tried to create WebMvcTest but also returns wrong exception. Is it some solution for it? I saw that I could call some validator inside the method but it looks like much more complex approach than annotation on method's argument.