Kismet

For the design-obsessed

Houses you walk around before you unpack

You will spend the first hour walking round the building instead of unpacking.

Somebody's hand is on every wall in these houses. A colour chosen once and run through every room, a screen that turns the daylight into lattice, a park laid out across 4 centuries, a swimming pool 100 metres above the city. In each case the building came first and the rooms were fitted to what it left.

Under each one is what was actually done, and by whom. If the building is the reason you are going, the room to ask for is usually not the largest.

6 houses

The resort's hundred-metre pool held out over Phang Nga Bay in the afternoon, its far lip level with the water, white parasols and loungers ranked along the deck and the green hills of the mainland folded into the haze beyond.
A 100-metre pool held out over Phang Nga Bay, its far lip level with the water.Pictured · COMO Point Yamu
Aqua Bar after dark: a long stone-clad counter under a sculpture of open wire cubes, white stools down its length, perforated screens lit from behind and the pool showing blue at the far end.

Phuket

COMO Point Yamu

There are two colours here, and they do all of 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 go cobalt, down to a bathroom lined floor to ceiling in narrow cobalt brick tile, so the room turns the colour of the water when the light is right. Underfoot are patterned cement tiles of the kind laid in Peranakan shophouses a century ago, and between the rooms are pierced white breeze-block screens that throw a lattice of shadow across the floor as the sun goes round. The peninsula it stands on is barely a kilometre wide.

The design
The lobby is woven rush pendants over polished concrete, between red-painted columns.
The house in full →
Bvlgari Resort Dubai from the air at sunset: the low white resort and its marina occupying the tip of Jumeira Bay Island, turquoise water all round it, and the Dubai skyline with the Burj Khalifa standing along the horizon behind.

Dubai

Bvlgari Resort Dubai

An island wrapped in a perforated white canopy, drawn to look like coral.

The canopy throws a dappled shadow across the terraces all day and glows from underneath at night. There is no tower: nothing here is more than a few storeys, which in this city is a statement in itself. The rooms are Italian in a way that has nothing to do with ornament — oak laid like a ship's deck, travertine and black granite, a woven headboard the width of the wall. Every room and suite has a balcony behind the pierced screen, built as a second living room with a couch and a breakfast table on it.

The design
Architecture and interiors by Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, on Jumeira Bay Island.
The house in full →
A Bird's Nest Pool Villa at dusk on the Kamala hillside, its woven lattice shell wrapped round a lit interior and round the pool below it, jungle closing in on every side.

Phuket

Keemala

A clay cone, a canvas tent, a tree house and a woven nest, and no two of them alike.

The hillside above Kamala is steep and thickly wooded, and the buildings are set into it rather than levelled onto it. 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. In a Clay Pool Cottage you are at ground level beside a stream with the forest at eye height; 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 design
Every one of the 38 villas has a pool, and 4 of the 5 kinds have a second shower outdoors.
The house in full →
Villa d'Este at dusk, seen from across the water: the lakefront façade lit gold, the floating pool moored just offshore, and the wooded hillside behind turning blue.

Lake Como

Villa d'Este

Two buildings in one park — the cardinal's own, and a pavilion added for a queen.

It has taken guests since 1873. The 10-hectare park holds Baroque, Renaissance and Romantic gardens at once, with a mosaic-walled nymphaeum, chestnut and magnolia trees, and a fountain of Hercules. The Queen's Pavilion was added in 1856 behind a red trompe-l'œil façade and named for Caroline of Brunswick. Moored on the lake itself is the floating pool, a teak-decked platform holding 45,000 litres of water, reached by its own wooden walkway.

The design
Built in 1568 by Pellegrino Pellegrini, as a cardinal's summer residence.
The house in full →
The fort palace at dusk, its long ochre front lit from below against a deep blue sky, with a domed chhatri standing up off the roofline and jharokha balconies down the face of it.

Udaipur

RAAS Devigarh

Inside the walls of a fort: 39 suites, and not one room.

You come up through a village of 1,000 temples and a stepwell, and then the road runs out at a gate in a wall, and the wall turns out to be the building. Past the gate is a sequence of courtyards climbing the hill, each giving onto the next through an arch. The windows are the fort's own: deep reveals in a metre of masonry, wooden shutters that fold back flat, and a cushioned seat built into the sill. There is almost nothing in the room to interrupt the light — a low bed on a stone plinth, a carved plaster panel behind it, a lamp set into the wall.

The design
The treatment rooms are carved sandstone, lit by candles set into wall niches.
The house in full →
The whole address from the air just after sunset: two glass towers with a lit horizontal building slung between them a hundred metres above Sheikh Zayed Road, eight lanes of white and red running underneath it, and the Burj Khalifa standing clear of the haze on the left.

Dubai

One&Only One Za'abeel

A beam 100 metres up, slung between 2 towers, with a swimming pool inside it.

The beam is The Link, and the Infinity Pool is inside it on Level 27, for guests aged 21 and over, with the Burj Khalifa filling the long side. A second pool, the Garden Pool, is down on Level 4. In the rooms the glass runs floor to ceiling, and the sill is low enough to sit on.

The design
The building is by Nikken Sekkei, and the interiors are by Jean-Michel Gathy's Denniston.
The house in full →

Say that the building is the reason for the trip when you book, and the concierge will ask for the room that shows it best.

Next theme · Where the kitchen is the reason →All themes