Banyan Tree Phuket

Saffron began as a curry house and is now the signature Thai restaurant of Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts. The room is a glasshouse — a pitched glass roof, timber louvres along the clerestory, terracotta underfoot and full-height windows down two sides onto the water — and the cooking is Thai classics with a modern hand, mostly in the plating. It is the one table to book before you arrive.

The room most guests start the day in, and it is built out over the lagoon rather than beside it — a series of timber decks with tables on them and water underneath. Breakfast is homemade pastries, tropical fruit and local dim sum, taken outside. At night the buffet turns international with a long Phuketian seafood section, the lanterns go on at every table and the far bank disappears.

A white tensile canopy standing out on the water at the end of its own walkway, lit from beneath after dark. The lagoon it stands on was an open tin mine before the resort was, and the bar is named for it. Spanish small plates and grills, premium wines and inventive cocktails, and the hour worth being here for is sundown, when the far bank goes copper and there is nothing between you and it.

Hōjō means abundance, and the kitchen takes that as a rule about buying rather than portions — what is good that week decides what is served. Tables run along the water, with the counter and its pendant lamps in an open pavilion on the other side of the pool. It opens for lunch as well as dinner.

Set inside the DoublePool villas at the quiet end of the estate, which makes it the restaurant guests out there walk to and everybody else takes a buggy to. The cooking runs the length of Italy — arancini, stuffed artichoke, risotto, osso buco, lobster oreganata — and the tables to ask for are on the deck, with green tub chairs and the water immediately below the balustrade. It also does breakfast for the hamlet.

A European room dropped into the tropics and better for it: green-and-white marble underfoot, rattan pendants and a hanging fern under a glazed pitched roof, a grand piano on a dark round dais at the centre, and the lagoon through the glass on two sides. Premium wines by the glass, artisanal cheese, hand-cut charcuterie and small plates that move with the season. Open from late morning until midnight, which makes it the room for the hour before dinner and the hour after it.

The plainest room here and the most useful: a bright café looking over the fairways of Laguna Golf Phuket. Light Thai dishes and café cooking — pizza, pasta, salads, sandwiches — and it is where the round finishes and where a late arrival eats.

The resort's beach club sits on the sand at Bang Tao — 3,500 square metres along 150 metres of shoreline. It splits into 3 zones: Young & Fun, which is 3 infinity pools, a DJ booth and alfresco seating for 180; Master Grill, built round a large charcoal oven for dry-aged cuts and whole grilled fish; and Prestige, a lounge closed to anyone who is not a member or a residence owner. Cooking is coastal seafood and Mediterranean over open flame. There are 5 private rooms, each taking 10. It is the loudest thing the resort owns, at the western edge of the estate, on the sand.