Keemala

The road up from Kamala climbs hard for about 4 minutes and stops at a curved timber shell lit from underneath, which is the entrance. Above it on the slope are 5 or 6 things that look like enormous baskets standing on stalks. Nothing here looks like a hotel, and that is not a figure of speech. You are walked or driven to your villa, and the paperwork happens sitting down inside it with a cold towel and a glass of something. The hillside is steep and thickly wooded and the buildings are set into it rather than levelled onto it, so what you see from the entrance is roofs — thatch, canvas, split bamboo, woven rattan — coming out of the canopy at 4 or 5 different heights, with the Andaman 4 kilometres away and a long way down. It is 45 minutes from Phuket International, 17 down the coast to Patong, and about 8 to the sand at Kamala.

Every villa here has its own pool and its own piece of hillside, and the hillside is the point: the walls that face the view are glass or canvas or nothing at all, and the walls that face your neighbour are earth or bamboo or a bank of trees. At 6 the cicadas start, which at this altitude is loud, and the light in the jungle goes from green to grey-green to nothing over about 20 minutes while the lamps come up along the walkways below. What you do with that hour depends on which clan you have chosen. In a Clay Pool Cottage you are at ground level beside a stream with the forest at eye height and a thatched cone over you. In a Tent Pool Villa you can hear the rain on canvas from the bed. In a Tree Pool House you are on the upper of two floors, in the branches, with the sea a grey line beyond the ridge. In a Bird's Nest you are inside a woven basket standing clear of the trees, with Kamala bay laid out below and a stone tub set against the window. The bathrooms deserve their own sentence: a black stone tub, an indoor monsoon shower and, in 4 of the 5, a second shower out in the open with the jungle in it.

Service here runs through one person, the villa host, rather than through a hotel: they check you in sitting down, they know which of the 4 architectures you are in and what that means, and they do the turndown. There is no children's club and no children's pool, for a stated reason — the site is open, steep and unfenced, and not every villa suits a child. What runs instead is a weekly programme, included and genuinely attended: sunrise yoga, guided meditation, tai chi, aqua fitness, Muay Thai, a tour of the garden, lessons in folding lotus flowers and making pandan potpourri, and a 2-hour cooking class for two in the garden itself. The sustainability here is concrete rather than a poster. Every villa treats its own water and the effluent is laboratory-tested monthly, greywater goes back onto the gardens, the villas hold glass bottles only, and the textiles are woven under the Doi Tung project in the north. Keemala refuses to sell or take commission on elephant rides, tiger shows and dolphin shows, and it keeps rescued water buffalo on the property. Drones are not permitted anywhere on it.