Another day at Twin Palms

According to company president, Kasam Sriirat, buyers are showing preference for condominium apartments because of the rising cost of land and stand alone houses.

Mr Kasem’s firm is planning a 120-room, three-star hotel and 80 pool villa project, called Phumandra, to start construction around June, 2011. The condominium project will be spread over 15 buildings, with starting prices of B2.29 million for a 46 sq.m. apartment with one bedroom and one bathroom.

Mr Kasam said the target market is younger generation people who want privacy, luxury and comfortable living and are “just starting their life experience.”  Thirty percent of the properties have already been sold, mainly to Bangkok people looking for holiday homes.

Another Winpro Engineering project, Chao Fah Garden Home project at Koh Kaew of 563 units in phase 1 sold all but 80, underlying the demand for houses in the B2-3 million range.

The expansion of companies like Winpro Engineering is typical of what is happening with Phuket based property investment and established hotel companies.

Wrap yourself in affordable luxury at Phumundra

For example, up market hotelier, Twin Palms of Surin Beach, has announced ambitious plans for a resort in Koh Samui and others in Hainan Iwsland, China, Bali, the Philippines, Vietnam and India.

Twin Palms is also behind the highly successful Bake bakeries on Phuket, which have become very popular with locals and tourists alike with their mixture of excellent bread, sandwiches, coffee and relaxed, sophisticated atmosphere.

Twin Palms opened in 2002 and has since established an iconic position on Phuket for its chic, minimalistic design and famous Sunday brunches.

Phuket Houses in 2-3 Million Baht Range in Demand is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Baan Yamu - three awards, including best architecture.

Hong Kong tycoon Alan Zeman’s Andara and Swedish developer Carl Langenskiold’s Baan Yamu each picked up a bundle of honours at the recent Thailand Property Awards 2010.

Andara was named Best Villa Development (Phuket) and Best Condo Development (Phuket), and received highly commended citations in the Condo Development (Thailand) and Villa Development (Thailand) categories.

Baan Yamu Residences received the award for Best Architectural Design in Thailand,  along with highly commended honours in the Condo Development (Phuket) and in the Green Development (Thailand) categories.

Bryan Lunt’s Absolute Developments Corp was named Best Boutique Developer in Thailand while CB Richard Ellis won the accolade for Best Agent in Phuket, followed by Indigo Real Estate.

Klaus Hebben’s Malaiwana was highly commended in the Villa Development (Phuket) category, along with Gulu Lalvani’s Royal Phuket Marina.  RPM was also highly commended in the Condo Development (Phuket) and Development Website categories.

Also highly commended were Mandala (Condo Development in Phuket);  Banyan Tree Phuket and Absolute Bangla Suites (Shared Ownership Development in Thailand); and, remarkably, the Häfele Design Center Phuket (Commercial Development in Thailand).

The awards are organised annually by publishers Ensign Media.  Full results are here.

Andara and Baan Yamu lead Phuket scorers in Property Awards is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Untangle the sentence and do some research and you discover that U Hotels is a brand name owned by Absolute. That’s Absolute, as in Bryan Lunt’s Absolute Bangla Suites in Patong, right? Nope. Nothing to do with him. This Absolute is based in Bangkok.

Let’s separate the two. In the blue corner, Lunt’s Absolute Resort Management, or ARM for short. ARM lists on its website eight resorts under management in Phuket, two on Koh Samui and two more in Pattaya.

In the red corner, the other Absolute, from Bangkok, Absolute Hotel Services, or AHS. We’ll go into detail in a moment.

The plot thickens. AHS’s hotel management brand is U which, as we already know, will be affixed to the new Nai Harn resort, due to open in 2011.

Bryan Lunt.

Now get this: ARM has a deal, announced a year ago, with famed design house Yoo (headed by über-designer Philippe Starck) to cooperate on a 256-apartment development on Phuket, scheduled to open next year. When it’s complete – supposedly next year – it will be managed by ARM.

Now AHS and U are moving into ARM’s home territory. Observer hears that ARM, with their “Absolute-Yoo” – and despite their public pronouncement on the topic (below) were none too happy with AHS and their “Absolute-U”.

A company source said They Had Talked With Their Lawyers.

However, the official response from Lunt was: “Although the name of the top-end residential partnership Absolute Resorts & Hotels/Yoo and the company Absolute Hotel Services/U could pose some confusion, we have no real cause for concern”

He added (take a deep breath), “In Thailand, our resorts services extend much further than just our hotel management division.  The Absolute World Group has been an established market leader since 1998 and is made up of six brands offering a seamless range of services in the vacation industry, encompassing select resorts and hotels, luxury boutique real estate, a vacation club with thousands of members, a booming fractional ownership and resale division and a leading lifestyle magazine. Absolute operates 27 offices globally and employs 1,300 staff.” There was quite a bit more, but we reckon you get the idea.

AHS were unfazed and equally voluble. The company’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Wigley, told the Observer, “Many companies have the same word in their name so really it is not very unusual.”

He went on, “[ARM] were not active in the market when we opened our company [and] our type of operations is very different.”

AHS was launched in the public eye just over two years ago, on June 26, 2008. It’s backed by multi-billion-baht Thai property developer Tanayong and headed by Wigley, who’s worked for the Minor Group, Marriott, Hilton, Omni, Delta and, most recently, boutique hotel management company Invision.

(Another Phuket connection; Invision was founded and is run by ex-JW Marriott Phuket GM Kevin Beauvais. Invision is another competitor in this increasingly crowded boutique hotel/resort management business; it runs the Glow Trinity Silom hotel in Bangkok and Villa Maroc in Pranburi, and, closer to Phuket. Zeavola Resorts Phi Phi.

It has also signed a deal to run the 123-room B-Lay Tong in Patong [due to open in December], and another to manage the villas at The Residence Phuket, in Bang Tao, under its Lantern brand.)

Jonathan Wigley

Wigley didn’t stay long with Invision – some 18 months – and when he left, two other Invision people went with him: John Westoby, who used to be Invision’s technical boss and is now AHS’s Chief Operating Officer, and Nopparat Pongwatanakulsiri, formerly Invision’s MarCom boss, now VP of Marketing at AHS.

The company’s website shows it has offices (or at least PO boxes) in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Australia. The impressive-looking U portfolio, as listed on the U website, includes a total of 14 properties in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India.

So far, however, only the 41-room U Chiang Mai is actually open. The U Inchantree in Kanchanaburi will open in November and is already taking bookings at very reasonable rates (between B2,000 and 3,000 a night). The other 12 are scheduled to open next year or in 2012.

The Phuket deal is so new that the U at Nai Harn is not yet listed in the website, but expect it to be up there soon.

Wigley doesn’t think there will be much confusion over the names. “Absolute Hotel Services is our company name, which is never used in a consumer environment; we are known to the consumer through our brands and hotel names.”

So no confusion? Well, only a little. “Whenever we have been contacted by mistake by someone looking for Absolute Resorts Management we just explain, then all [is] clear.”

As to the U-Yoo question, he responded, “The brand names U Hotels & Resorts and Yoo are clearly very different so we do not anticipate any issues in Phuket or anywhere else.”

So what it comes down to is that everything is cool and everyone’s happy.

Meanwhile, friends will be asking one another, “So you are staying at Yoo, are you?”  ”Oh no. I’m staying at U. How about you?” Confusion? Absolutely not…

Resorting to Absolute confusion in Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Villa Chan Grajang. Yours for US$8m, or roughly B256m.

Oh dear. Just when we thought we’d found Phuket’s most expensive home for sale, at US$7 million, along comes another one selling for US$8 million.

Not only that, it’s not on Millionaires’ Mile – it’s up above Surin Beach, effectively out-millionairing Millionaires’ Mile by a million bucks.

“Surin Beach is becoming an iconic Asian island getaway for the rich and famous come to unwind,” confirms Bill Barnett, Managing Director of hospitality consultancy C9 Hotelworks. “They are lured to Surin by [the attraction of] complete privacy in an exotic Asian destination, be it a mega villa overlooking the stunning Phuket west coast or a cruise to Phang Nga Bay in a super yacht.

“As a sign of the times, Phuket International Airport is building a private jet terminal to handle the growing number of these affluent arrivals flocking to the area.”

The eight-million-dollar house for sale, Villa Chan Grajang, is at the top of the Ayara Baan Thai Surin Hill estate, with huge views across the ocean. It attracts more than its fair share of rentals in the very high-end market. It was completed about 18 months ago.

Joanne Baylis, founder of Awesome Villas and the owner’s representative of Villa Chan Grajang, says, “The villa is a good example of a Surin lifestyle property that is impeccably maintained, staffed and operated, and consequently has a 95% occupancy rate and a waiting list that includes some of the world’s most affluent individuals.”

Quick description: Villa Chan Grajang has six bedrooms (all ensuite, of course), parking for up to six cars, interiors by Angela Hall and seven full-time staff including a chef (no, you don’t get to own them – you have to pay them salaries). Four of them live in.

Villa Yin - selling at a bit of a discount.

Interestingly, Villa Yin, at Cape Sol on Millionaires’ Mile, which was for sale at this time last year for US$8 million (See NY Times article) is currently listed at $7.25 million. The owners also built Villa Yang next door, and that’s currently for sale at $4.25 million. If you buy both, you can probably get a good discount.

Our question is, why do these people spend so much money and time building these astonishing homes and then turn around almost immediately and sell them? Where’s the joy in that?

Another home for sale in Phuket – at $8m is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Who's the current owner? We're not at Liberty to say...

Phuket Observer believes that Liberty, a cliff-top dwelling on Millionaires’ Mile, may be the most expensive home yet offered in the Phuket luxury home market.

The reported price tag: US$7 million, or around 224 million Thai baht. That’s more than the Thai government announced earlier this month it would spend on the “national reform process” following the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok and elsewhere in April and May this year.

Or put it another way: If you paid cash for this house, in Thai one-thousand-baht notes, the notes, laid end-to-end, would stretch almost 36 kilometres, or the distance from Phuket Town to the Sarasin Bridge.

But then, this is no ordinary two-bed, one-and-a-half-bath home. For a start, it’s on Millionaires’ Mile in Kamala, at the far end facing Patong. Where else? It was designed by architects Arte Charpentier of Paris, whose portfolio also includes Century Avenue, a five-kilometre stretch of stunning buildings in Shanghai (along with the city’s Opera House and the its Police HQ) and the St Lazare Metro station in Paris, along with hotels, office buildings and private residences, and the rest of the Jomchang private development where you’ll find Liberty.

The house has living space totalling 1,213 square metres and sits on just under a rai (1,600 sqm) of clifftop land. It steps down through five levels (not including the swimming platform at the foot of the cliff). And if you don’t like the idea of all those steps, there are elevators connecting each level with the next.

It has five bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, a huge cinema and entertainment room, equally enormous European and Thai kitchens, a pool (infinity edge, of course) with an outdoor bar, and a private sala overlooking the Andaman Sea.

Please note: the place comes fully equipped with the best appliances but you’ll need to bring your own furniture. For more on this once-in-a-lifetime, not-to-be-missed opportunity, see the Liberty website.

Millionaires’ Mile home in Kamala for sale at a cool $7m is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Being on the east coast, Grove Gardens has views of mangroves rather than beaches.

American hotel management company LaTour is at it again, signing up its third property in Phuket, which also becomes, in press releases, its “third property in Asia”. (Well, it’s true, isn’t it?)

The company already has management deals with Indochine in Kalim and the Dewa resort on Nai Yang Beach. This time it’s gone east to Cape Yamu to take on Grove Gardens and run it as a resort.

There is a connection here – Grove Gardens was developed by former hotelier and long-time Phuket guy Lard Ydmark, who also built and part-owns Dewa. Plainly, the LaTour bosses like the big Swede.

Grove Gardens was originally built as a straight property development, with homes for sale. It’s always had a restaurant and has acquired other facilities including a big pool, tennis courts and a spa. More recently, a hotel element was added, allowing owners to make a bit of money from their homes when they are not there.

The pool at Grove Gardens.

Grove Gardens has 36 units ranging from two-bedroom garden apartments to three-bedroom pool residences, thus allowing to to claim a four-star niche between the standard hotel pool villa (usually one room) and the top-end rental villa (anything up to six rooms).

LaTour have been so busy sending out press releases that they seem to have rather run out of superlatives. In the release announcing the Grove Garden deal, Tom LaTour, chairman of LaTour Hotels and Resorts, is quoted as saying, “We continue to build on the strength of our partnership with IndoChine Group and position [of] the LaTour brand as a premier provider of management services in the Asia-Pacific region.”

But we’re sure he’s more excited than that about the new deal.

LaTour to manage Grove Gardens is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

The sun sets over the Andaman Sea. Now holiday home buyers can have confidence that the real estate view is rather more attractive, too, according to Jones Lang LaSalle's transparency survey. - Photo by Rene Erhardt

After tourism and rubber, property is the third-biggest industry in Phuket, so sellers of homes on the island – who have been looking at blank order books thanks to the global financial crisis and the Red Shirt violence in Bangkok – will be happy to know that Thailand’s ranking for the transparency of its real estate market has improved, giving buyers increased confidence.

The country still ranks 39th out of 81 property markets surveyed by real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and its investment management business, LaSalle Investment Management, which compile the biennial rankings.

In the last survey, in 2008, Thailand came 45th. Its score has improved steadily, from 3.40 in 2006, to 3.16 in 2008 and 3.02 this year. (Scores range from 1 for total transparency to 5 for “opaque”.)

“The improved score is primarily a reflection of more transparency in the capital markets, specifically as they relate to real estate,” a release from JLL explained. “Currently there are 60 firms listed under the Property Development sector on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). There are also 26 property funds that trade on the SET, holding assets of various real estate types. These listed vehicles are subject to higher governance and regulation, as well as regular and standardized reporting, thus providing more transparency to Thailand’s real estate markets.

“This is in contrast with the past when Thailand suffered badly from a lack of information about real estate transactions in the market. Major sale transactions in particular tended to be kept confidential by the sellers and/or the purchasers. As a result, actual transacted values against which to benchmark were scarce.”

'Generally, rising levels of transparency help reduce investment risks." - Longlom Bunnag, Chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle in Thailand

However, Longlom Bunnag, Chairman of JLL in Thailand, warned, “Generally, rising levels of transparency help reduce investment risks, particularly for foreign investors. However, the improved level of transparency in Thailand’s real estate market does not necessarily attract more investment.

“Certain investment decisions in some semi-transparent and opaque markets are opportunistic and in some cases exploit the lack of transparency, thus capturing higher returns.”

“That said, higher levels of market transparency and an increased availability of reliable market information do even the playing field overall, helping investors as well as owners and occupiers make more informed real estate decisions,” he said.

Australia ranks first in JLL’s 2010 survey, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom. Thailand, at 39th, still ranks as “semi-transparent”, one place behind Brazil and one place ahead of Bulgaria.

Phuket’s biggest rivals in the tropical beach property business, the Philippines, Indonesia (Bali) and Vietnam rank a long way behind; the Philippines in 48th place with a score of 3.15, Indonesia at 57th with a score of 3.46 and Vietnam six places from the bottom of the list with a score of 4.25, lower even than such murky places as Pakistan and Kazakhstan.

However, Malaysia, which has been trying to lure property buyers away from Phuket with promises of freehold land ownership and long-term residence visas, ranks 25th – and 2nd in Southeast Asia – with a score of 2.30. Singapore leads in the region, in 16th place worldwide with a score of 1.73.

The survey was compiled from responses to a 20-question survey, with each question having a five-choice answer (1-5), with 1 meaning the market is highly transparent and 5 meaning the market is opaque.

Here is the full list:

Good news for Phuket property sellers and buyers is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Michael Ma - "I’ve been green for 30 years."

Michael Ma’s getting pretty fit these days. It’s all that climbing up and down steps at his latest acquisition, the hillside Indochine Resort in Phuket, formerly the troubled Villa Santi property development.

The Phuket resort is a new departure for Ma’s company, the Indochine Group. It’s the group’s first venture in Thailand, and its first resort – all the other Indochine properties so far have been bars, restaurants and night clubs.

Is it hard running a resort? Not really, he says. After all, in the rooms and villas, people serve their own drinks. All the resort managers he has spoken to agreed that the food and beverage aspect is the hardest – and F&B is something Indochine knows inside and out, and on a large scale.

Each of its major outlets – five complexes in Singapore, two each in KL and Hamburg and one in Jakarta, which Dubai next on the list – can hold up to 2,000 people, and the ones in Singapore have catered to events for the International Union of Conservation for Nature, the IMF and the World Bank, along with after-event parties for the MTV Asia awards and the International Indian Film Academy Awards.

It also hosted the International Olympic 2012 Bid parties of London, New York, and Paris – all at the same time in different venues.

Apart from the big parties, individual guests have included Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and his wife, Mrs. Cherie Blair, and Prince Albert of Monaco. None of these people would tolerate shoddy F&B for long.

The hardest thing about Indochine Phuket, he says, has been getting it finished. The contractor’s six months behind schedule. “This is the hardest it’s ever been,” he says. “Even in Jakarta and Delhi things went much faster than this. That’s why I need to be here right now.” But he perseveres, stumping up and down the steps to deliver instructions in Thai, Lao or English, depending on who needs chivvying along.

Ma’s Indochine Group quietly bought Villa Santi a couple of years ago. He loves the site of the resort, climbing up a hill at the north end of Patong Bay, giving it a panorama that delights Ma night and day. All his existing bars, restaurants and nightclubs – in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Germany – have great views, he explains, but Indochine Phuket is the only one with a 24/7 panorama.

Daytime panorama from Indochine. At night there are the bright lights of Patong, hot air balloons and, often fireworks.

The view is an essential part of Ma’s outlook on business, his approach to tackling new projects. He explains, “I like to see the end-game first. Then I work backwards. I see the picture and I know the ending of the story. I’m a film producer and director.

“I love food, wine, partying. I’ve been doing that since I was about 14-15 years old. Then I got into art and design, so it’s an eclectic mixture of my experience. When I was a commodity trader I went to the best bars and restaurants all over the world – and you see the difference. I know exactly what I want.

“Every day, at the end of the party, there’s romance. Every day there’s drama. It’s an Oscar-winning story. So you just take that story and elongate it to eight hours a day or, in the case of the resort, 24 hours a day.”
Ma’s definitely got a sybaritic side to him – he counts beautiful people and glitterati such as Sting, David and Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, INXS, Gong Li and Mariah Carey among his acquaintances.

But apart from that and his palpable business acumen, he is also very serious about the environment and takes his social responsibilities as a given.

These attitudes are not PR BS. Many resorts – indeed, many corporations, even property developers – tout themselves as “green”. But few can claim among their friends Dr Ashok Khosla, President of the IUCN, the umbrella for hundreds of green activist groups, including the WWWF and Greenpeace. The IUCN is the only environmental organisation to have observer status at the UN. Ma is its Singapore representative.

In an interview, he launches immediately into an explanation of how he is striving to make Indochine Phuket as green as possible.

“It’s not that we ‘want’ to be green – I’ve been green for 30 years. We don’t do shark fin soup, bluefin tuna, yellow tuna, or sturgeon. We’ve been doing this for 11 years in Singapore and everywhere else.

“Everything that we’ve built new [at Indochine Phuket has environmental considerations in mind]. There’s double insulation, there’s LED lighting, there’s a heat exchange system going in so that whenever we turn on the aircon we get free hot water.

“Our investment level is higher but the aim is to reduce power consumption. We’re looking at composting. Anything non-dairy, non-protein will be separated for local pig farms. Any plant trimmings will be turned into fertiliser.

“Our ‘timber’ decking is 50% recycled plastic, 50% rice hull. All the plastic chairs you see are recycled plastic with UV inhibitor so they’re built to be light and last for years. That’s the sort of spec we’re going for.”

Whenever possible, locally-sourced materials are used, not just because they may be cheaper, but because transporting them produces less CO2 than if they were brought, say, from Bangkok.

Similarly, for many companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is something they feel they must do in order to show they are good corporate citizens – with a helpful PR spinoff.

Ma, however, was taking his social responsibilities seriously long before he went into business. In Australia, where he grew up after his family fled the arrival of the communist regime in his native Laos, he acted, when he was just 16 or 17, as an interpreter between the Indochinese community (many of whom could speak little or no English) and the authorities and NGOs.

Through interpreting, Ma met the Mayor of Sydney and other politicians, and soon graduated into an advocacy role. He was urged to go into politics and joined the more conservative of the two main political parties, the Liberals. This was not, he explained, because he had political ambitions, o because his views are right wing – far from it – but because someone pointed out that the Liberals had no members with Southeast Asian backgrounds.

“I joined so that I could maybe counterbalance some of the people on the extreme right – the Pauline Hansons and so on.” In 1990 he was voted Young Liberal of the Year.

Twenty years on, and he is still involved in supporting the community, locally and in a much wider way. In Singapore, he says, he is on the board of such entities as Action for Community Enterprise, and is a consultant with the National Environment Agency and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Naturally, the company is involved. In the recent past, Indochine has organised events supporting tsunami relief, aid to children with HIV and heart research. This is in addition to its Green Festival, aimed at raising awareness of the issues before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.

All of these has a strong fun element, reflecting Ma’s own philosophy of life. He’s not going to go as far as giving up his good food, wine and partying to go live in a cave in order to save the environment. And he’s not going to give up his stretch limo. “People ask me how I can be green and have a stretch limo. I tell them it can carry eight people with the same engine as the four-seat version,” he grins.

Bright green lights for Indochine Phuket’s Michael Ma is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Kata Rocks Club Penthouse (CG image) won the Best Apartment in Asia Pacific award.

Each year, the various entries are ranked with either five stars or a “highly commended”. Of the five-star entries, one is chosen as winner in the category, but all five-starred entries go through to the international finals, sponsored this year by Bloomberg TV.

Kata Rocks took first place in the Best Apartment class for its Club Penthouse. It also received a “highly commended in the Best Development” class. It is currently under construction at the tip of the headland between Kata  and Kata Noi beaches, at the behest of investors headed by British developer Richard Pope.

The clifftop Villa Amanzi won the Best Architecture (Single Unit) for Originla Vision.

Winner of the Best Architecture (Single Unit) award was Hong Kong-based Original Vision (which has an office in Phuket), for its design of the six-bedroom Villa Amanzi at Cape Sol on millionaires’ mile in Kamala. Like Kata Rocks, this huge private villa perches high over the sea, with wide views of the ocean.

In terms of exposure, Original Vision are probably the biggest winners in the contest – they are also the architects for Kata Rocks, with the Phuket office handling project management.

Baan Yamu Phase II received five stars in the Best Architecture (Multiple Units) class – design by Tierra Design. It also picked up a highly commended in the Best Development class – as did Kata Rocks.

One final Phuket award: realestate.phuket.net, the real estate arm of hotel booking giant Phuket.Com, snagged a highly commended in the Best Real Estate Agency Website category.

The lists of winner in the awards can be seen here.

Thin pickings in property awards is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

One of the enormous pool villas available for large parties at Andara - or for couples who like to rattle around in a lot of space.

The grand Andara Resort has now opened on Millionaires’ Mile in Kamala, following a well-established model whereby developers build villas and apartments, sell them, and then – when the owners are not in residence – rent them out by the night to tourists.

Most agree it’s a win-win model. The developer – in this case Hong Kong tycoon Allan Zeman – sells the homes and then gets to make even more money out of them after they are sold.

The owners (in the case of Andara, most are Hong Kong residents who may spend no more than a few weeks a year in Phuket) get a slice of the revenue to offset the maintenance fees and, in a good month, see a healthy income.

And well-heeled tourists get to stay in splendid comfort in any of the 26 pool villas or 36 suites, at rack rates ranging from US$710 a night for a one-bedroom terrace suite to US$4,480 for a six-bedroom pool villa (that’s US$746 per bedroom).

It has to be said that the design of Andara is stunning. The lobby, with its three-meter-high statues of Buddhist monks and a ceiling so high as to be almost out of view, is awe-inspiring, if a little confusing (are we in a resort or in a place of worship?)

A long, equally impressive corridor with shops on either side leads to the huge gates of the spa, and the stairs or elevator to the upper deck with its enormous swimming pool, palm trees, huge open bar, cocktail bar and restaurant, and wide-open views across Kamala Bay.

Lots of wood trimmings make Silk restaurant cosy despite its size. There's an indoor, airconditioned section, or an outdoor dining area.

The restaurant, Silk, used to be on the top floor of another Zeman Phuket project, the Plaza Surin shopping centre, but has been moved to Andara. It has been staffed with excellent people, many of them – including Chef Supreeda, better known as Oy – poached from that Phuket playground of the rich and famous, Amanpuri. In fact, it is rumoured that Zeman enticed so many staff away from Amanpuri that the other Mr Z, Amanpuri owner Adrian Zecha, is less than amused.

But this certainly ensures excellent food at Silk, as the Observer discovered during a recent delightful evening. The Observer‘s Thai food specialist, who is very hard to please, had only one small criticism – there wasn’t enough penang sauce on the prawns, something that’s easy to fix. Otherwise she pronounced it excellent.

The menu of 81 items offers a choice of Thai or Italian, which should satisfy just about anyone, and prices are not totally out of reach, ranging from B995 for a grilled tenderloin main course or a Milanese lamb shank down to 215 baht for a couple of slices of mango with sticky rice. Comparable mangoes in the market cost around B40 a kilo, but this is, after all, a five-star-plus resort, and they do an excellent job of peeling and slicing the mangoes for you.

We were unable to see any of the rooms; they were all occupied – the result, possibly, of a two-nights-for-the-price-of-one opening offer that lasted for the initial three months after the resort opened. But there are plenty of pictures on the Andara website to drool over.

The beach directly below Andara could not by any stretch of the imagination be classed as beautiful, so the resort has a shuttle service that takes guests to the Andara Beach Club, on the main Kamala beach, which is beautiful.

Nip out to see the sights on a motor yacht. This is the little one, the Andara.

For those who want to get a little further away, the resort also has two motor yachts for charter, the 28-metre Andara, which can take parties of up to 15 people for day trips (or smaller groups for overnighters), and the 35-metre Celebrity, which can manage 20 day-trippers. Trimmings include an onboard chef. Prices range from US$3,000 for a half-day trip.

And of course, no five-star resort these days is complete without a spa. Treatments include traditional Thai massage, Javanese, Ayuraveda, Swiss and Swedish massage, as well as the expected variety of scrubs, detox and body treatments. Six single treatment rooms and two couples rooms – with Jacuzzi. Staff can also provide treatments in your luxurious suite or villa.

In fact, you might want to check out the prices in the spa – it may be more cost-effective to book one of the treatment rooms for your entire holiday. But then, of course, you wouldn’t get the views.

Andara Resort sets new standards is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.