The original Thai boutique hotel, Mom Tri's Boathouse on Phuket, opened for business 12 years ago, pitched somewhere between the $2-a-night backpacker's beach hideaway and the ex-colonial grandeur of the towering Bangkok Oriental hotel. Now Thailand is beginning to offer a great line in the traveller's holy grail of the Noughties. Small(ish), intimate, unique - in architectural style and interior design - with sophisticated amenities and a personal touch, boutique hotels are expected to contain less than 150 rooms (the fewer the better) and to offer the hackneyed traveller a surprise. The finishing touches are a restaurant serving great food and - the prerequisite for modern Sybarites - a spa, ensuring that all the senses are sated.
Three intriguing new boutique billets have opened in the past 15 months within the same steamy Andaman Sea area, off the west coast of the elephant's trunk of the Thai peninsula. Perhaps in response to this new competition, Mom Tri's is expanding its exclusive villa complex this year.
Mom Tri's Boathouse
Kata Beach, Phuket (00 66 76 330 015)
Double rooms from 8,000 baht (£120) high season and £60 low season (16 April-31 October), including breakfasts. The Villa Royale suites cost from £126 a night.
Capacity: 36 rooms (Boathouse), six villas (Villa Royale). Nineteen new villas in Villa Royale available in October.
Mom Tri's Boathouse comfortably sprawls across the southern corner of the mile-long crescent-shaped Kata Yai beach. There is a whiff of Magaluf about Kata. Identikit tie-dye sarong shops and pizza and beer parlours sit at the entrance of avenues that, if you delve further, offer lady boys and 'sensual massage' for the price of a bottle of supermarket champagne. But Mom Tri's makes light of this, showcasing its spectacular beachside view and blocking off the hustle behind.
The nautically themed hotel - the owner, architect and socialite Mom Tri Devakul is obsessed by boats - is sexier than it sounds. Faded Polaroid montages of regular guests jostle with local art on the wood and whitewash walls, fitting Mom Tri's desire to own 'a hotel for people who prefer not to stay in hotels'. Taking the notion of boutique literally, all the art and other artefacts in the foyer are for sale: silks, basketry and, bizarrely, a thirteenth-century Khmer figurine of Vishnu for £565.
Wine and food (in that order) are the points of order here. The dining is the finest imaginable, with an open teak-framed terrace intertwined with baobab trees, raised to receive the warm breeze and with the rollers softly crashing across the strip of sand. Here comes the wine list - all three metres of it. With 420 wines to choose from, ranging from £18 to £4,500 a bottle, and maître d' Rodolphe Gay - formerly butler to French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur - hovering over your shoulder, the sultry heat feels more intense. But in this furnace the bone-dry New Zealand sauvignon tastes like nectar of the gods - gods in the sense of humans raised to an unaccustomed level of luxury with birds and surf providing the soundtrack. The four-course French menu (£27) is delicious too.
Mom Tri calls his hotel 'a restaurant with rooms'. These are capacious, with lacquered bamboo cane chairs, teak and raffia yacht-style sideboard and jade-tiled bathroom. It is not Philippe Starck but it is extremely comfortable. Breakfast is back on the terrace with crows flirting in the trees and the breeze blowing away the cobwebs, over coffee, rolls and fresh fruit.
A 'Sportsman's Massage' is delivered with gusto by an ex-pro boxer. I may as well have gone a round with him, it would have felt the same but sounded cooler. The hotel rooms are set in a C-shape around a large whirlpool bath, which none of the middle-aged, mittel-European guests choose to enter. Being on the edge of a public beach, intimacy is not a top selling point during the day, but when darkness falls, Mom Tri's offers one of the most magical dinners on earth.
The Villa Royale is a walled-off area a short way down the coast. Six villas nestle among boulders and trees on a terraced cliff tumbling down to sea.
The villas are superbly decked out with individual themes - images from the romantic spiritual Hindu legend the Ramayana in one, leopard and tiger skins in another - and all have their own wine cellars. Two restaurants provide high-class food at the top of this botany-dominated complex. This is a fantastic, luxurious and private world.
Avantika
Patong Beach, Phuket (00 66 76 292 801)
Double rooms from £63 a night, room only.
Capacity: 31 rooms. Opened December 2002.
The whiff of Magaluf becomes a stench five miles up the coast on Patong Beach. Three miles long and presided over by a Gotham-like tower (incomplete timeshares), way out of proportion to the entire nation's buildings, let alone a beach resort, this is the commercial hub of the most commercial island in Thailand.
It is all braids, tattoos and tat - international disco pubs, bungee jumps, go-karting etc. The best advertised product is the Simon Cabaret - 'more of a man than you'll ever be and even more of a woman' - which gives a Carry On spin to the sex tourism element of Phuket. So not, perhaps, the most promising spot for the unique, intimate and stylish. But, as with all such mature resorts, the beach is spectacular.
Avantika is the newest of the new. At the slightly quieter, southern end of the strip it is pinioned between two other hotels, unsurprising as the strip consists of little else. Oriental style makes the best of cramped surroundings, so with high walls set around a deep black pool, the feng shui-sters get to work with lotus flowers, orchids, bleached woods and an absence of clutter.
The spa is a small pavilion at the end of the pool presided over with ruthless efficiency by two expert masseuses. The rooms boast curtained king-sized beds, oriental brocade, small balconies, black satinwood and pale stone. Traditional artefacts and paintings complete the understated luxury. The restaurant offers tasty Thai-Indian cuisine, reflecting the island's centuries-old role as an important trade centre for the region. Ignoring the cars put-putting along the road in front, the pool bar is ideally placed for a drink as the sun takes its evening swim. Avantika was just opening when I visited, so it was hard to judge the ambience. But they have done a good job in a small space, creating a very smart place.
Baan Yin Dee
Patong Beach, Phuket (00 66 76 294104)
Double rooms from £52 low season (1 May-10 October) and £82 peak season (16 December-15 January).
Capacity: 20 rooms.
Opened December 2001.
This stylish offering perches one mile's walk south up the steep hill from Avantika, enjoying the violent breezes of the Andaman Sea morn and eve. Small, luxurious and personalised - there are no room numbers - Baan Yin Dee is run by the De Beer brothers from Belgium. With the beach way below, the four buildings are set around a freshwater pool. Water descends from the top swimming area through several small pools - one with whirlpool bath - into a larger one at the base. This is a sun trap, a great place to relax with a book in privacy. Peace is marred only by the occasional cement mixer or bus roaring up the road two feet away.
Feng-shui traits abide inside and out. Each room has an entrance balcony two metres from the water. Inside they are large, cavernous by Thai hotel standards, with cool, varnished teak floors. The bedrooms boast beds with state-of-the-art Nasa-developed mattresses and widescreen TV. Split off by fortress-style sliding doors is the bathroom, with a family-sized stone bath and a deluge shower that could clean an elephant in 10 seconds. There is a spa menu but you must travel into town to receive your mauling. As for the food, you can detect the Belgian influence - the traditional Thai cuisine undermined by a preponderance of grease. Other negatives: the cockroach scuttling along the floor does not make you feel any hungrier, also of dubious charm, the baby-grand tinklings and warblings of Johann De Beer, and nothing is too little trouble for the maître d'. But a stylish and secluded retreat none the less.
Pimalai Resort & Spa
Lanta Yai (00 66 75 607988)
Double rooms from £88 low season (1 May-31 October) and from £150 at other times.
Capacity: 86 rooms, suites and villas. Opened November 2001
Pimalai boasts three things that elevate it above the previous three noble efforts to being the Queen Bee hotel of the Andaman Sea: location, location, location. Just over 50 miles south-east of Phuket, the scattering of 52 islands that make up Ko Lanta form a natural, unblemished world. Jungle-covered Lanta Yai is the largest of these, and on the southern tip sits the resort of Pimalai, facing out to sea in private grace.
Sultry air buffets you on the magical motor launch ride from the mainland through the dark to the candlelit beachfront. Set in beautifully landscaped tropical gardens with dinosaur-sized plants, butterflies and dragonflies, Pimalai achieves that pinnacle managed by all great hotels - great service without effort or interference. The staff, smiling, efficiently get everything absolutely right. They also have most periodicals, internet access and the classical literature of the UK, France, Germany and Japan and the recent films of Hollywood.
All the rooms are stand-alone bungalows. Large, minimalist with queen-sized beds, they boast the latest hi-fi, DVD and TV technology, vast stone bathrooms and huge balconies overlooking the sea in total privacy. There is even a bed on the balcony.
Room service provided a delicious meal of linguine, sun-dried tomatoes and capers, followed by steak bearnaise, just when the thrill of red duck curry was beginning to pall. The three restaurants were superb for both Western and Thai cuisine. They and the two bars are spread out across the 100-acre plot, cunningly landscaped to seem far larger than the distances your feet need to cover. A vast pool plays second fiddle to the long stretch of scorching white sandy beach where the gentle green Andaman brine serenades the evening's White Russian.
Fat orange and gold koi carp swim lazily through the green pools of water softly burbling beneath the wooden walkways and platforms that make up the spa. Lying on a mattress on an elevated platform with the afternoon breeze softly playing through the tropical foliage, the Thai masseuse gives your body the pummelling of your life: certainly worth travelling a third of the way round the world for.
Factfile
International flights: Qatar Airways (0870 7704215) offers four flights a week from Heathrow, via Doha, to Bangkok. Economy class fares start from £338 return, plus taxes.
Internal flights: Bangkok Airways (01293 596626) flies between Bangkok and Phuket 14 times a day from £40 one way. Thai Airways (0870 606 0911) flies between Bangkok and Krabi (for Ko Lanta and Pimalai) from £38. Tickets can be purchased at any Thai airport.
