Rosewood Phuket

Patong is the loudest place on this island, and the way here goes straight through the middle of it. The beach road, the bars, the traffic, and then a turn south onto Muen-Ngern Road and a climb. The road runs out, and then there is a gate, and then there is nothing else. Emerald Bay is the next cove down from Tri-Trang, small, held between two forested headlands, and the resort has 600 metres of it. What that buys is very specific and it is the whole point of the place: you are 8 minutes from Patong when you want it and completely out of earshot of it when you do not. Nothing here is more than 2 or 3 storeys. The buildings step down a green hillside in ones and twos with jungle left standing between them, roofs planted over so that from above the whole property reads as canopy with pools cut into it. The arrival is a timber pergola over a lily pond with a single tree at the end of it and creeper hanging the full height of a stone wall, which tells you within about 15 seconds that this house is Thai and quiet rather than grand. Phuket International is 40 kilometres and 60 to 90 minutes north, depending entirely on what Patong is doing that afternoon; a metered taxi is about THB 1,600 and the house will send a car, with fast-track immigration if the flight is a direct international one.

The pavilions are one long room with the wall taken away. Coffered white ceilings, dark timber floors, a folding cane screen that half-separates the bed from the sitting end, and then a sheet of glass the width of the room that slides back until there is no inside. Beyond it is a sun deck with a plunge pool along one edge, a double lounger under a parasol, and a table you can eat breakfast at. The bathroom is the other surprise — two freestanding vanities facing each other under tall black-framed mirrors, and between them a door onto a walled courtyard with a soaking tub open to the sky and a rain shower beside it. The light comes low up the bay in the last hour and the room fills with it; the plunge pool goes dark; and the cicadas in the hillside behind start, which at first is a lot and by the second night is the reason you sleep. Which pavilion you are in changes what is on the other side of that glass, and nothing else. The Garden faces its own planting — heliconia and banana grown close in, and no view at all, deliberately. The Lagoon opens onto still water with the beach trees behind it. The Partial Ocean View looks up the bay through a gap in the casuarinas. Read each before you choose; they are the same room and they are not the same holiday.