COMO Point Yamu

Everyone else goes west. The beaches Phuket is famous for — Patong, Kamala, Surin — are all on the sunset side, and the road from the airport pours south-west towards them within 10 minutes of the terminal. This one goes the other way, east through Thalang, past rubber smallholdings and shrimp ponds and a couple of villages, and after 25 minutes it turns onto a peninsula barely a kilometre wide. The road runs out, and then the land does. What is at the end is a low building the colour of chalk with a tiled roof over a flight of shallow steps, a bank of feather grass in front of it, and a gap under the roof through which, as you climb, the whole of Phang Nga Bay arrives at once: flat pale water, the limestone islands standing up out of it, and the mainland hills folded blue behind. Nothing is on this headland except the resort. There is no strip, no beach road, no parade of massage shops and tailors. The shore below is rocky rather than sandy. What there is instead is 100 metres of pool held out over the water at the height of the trees.

Paola Navone drew the interiors and the colour is doing the work. Aquamarine for the sea and burnt orange for the robes of the monks and the shophouse fronts of Phuket Old Town — the two run through the whole place, sometimes in the same room. The Bay grades are cobalt: a slatted timber headboard with deep blue panels set into it, cobalt tub chairs at the desk, and a bathroom lined floor to ceiling in narrow cobalt brick tile so the whole room turns the colour of the water when the light is right. The Phang Nga grades are turquoise instead, and their glass slides away entirely onto a terrace with a pool cut into it. Underfoot everywhere are patterned cement tiles, the kind that were laid in Peranakan shophouses a century ago, and between rooms there are pierced white breeze-block screens that throw a lattice of shadow across the floor as the sun goes round. In the last hour the light comes off the bay low and flat, the islands go from grey-green to charcoal, the water turns the colour of tin, and the fishing boats that have been out all day start back across the shallows towards the pier at the neck of the cape.

COMO's register is quiet and slightly self-effacing — nobody performs at you here — and the specifics are more interesting than the manner. Every villa gets a villa host rather than a butler, which in practice means one person who knows your name and your plans and books everything. Housekeeping comes twice a day. There is a manager on duty around the clock, foreign exchange at the desk, and a shop of Thai ceramics and COMO's own things off the lobby, which is itself one of the better rooms in the building: woven rush pendants in a row under a slatted ceiling, low white seating on polished concrete, red-painted columns. Children are properly provided for — Play by COMO runs from 9 to 6 with tie-dye and bracelet-making and lawn games, there is a separate teens' room with a pool table and darts, and children 6 and under eat free. What is arranged beyond the gate is where the east coast pays off: the house keeps its own boat, the Capricorn, and Phang Nga Bay's karsts and caves and the beach on Rang Yai are an hour away by water rather than a day away by road. There is a guided tour of the resort's own art collection, a Muay Thai session, a cooking class, a walk through Phuket Old Town's Sino-Portuguese streets, a rainforest hike, a gibbon rehabilitation project and an elephant sanctuary that is genuinely a sanctuary. Almost all of it is quoted before service and tax, which is simply how Thailand prices things.