15 of Asia’s Most Amazing Hotels
The hotel biz is booming in Asia. Starwood alone is opening up a new hotel every two weeks, and that's just in China. So we rounded up Asia’s 15 can’t-miss destination hotels just in time for the summer travel season.
Treehouse hotels abound in India, but China has one too. The Nanshan Treehouse Resort is set in a vast 20,000 sq. kilometer ecological and Buddhist park in Sanya that also features a 354-foot statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, and is composed of four huts built in the canopies of tamarind trees. The huts overlook pristine beaches and onto the blue South China sea, and are linked by suspension bridges. The six- to 12-person treehouses have electricity, and hot showers are only a short walk away. This is not intended to be luxury accommodation, so expect to share your digs with a few ants and other bugs, but if you’ve always fancied living like an Ewok, then this is the place for you. Treehouses can be rented by the room for ¥220-400 or you can take an entire treehouse, Swiss Family Robinson-style, from about ¥1,000.
Find it: www.treehousesofhawaii.com
Sitting in the Golden Triangle on the border of Burma, Laos and Thailand, the sumptuous Anantara Golden Triangle Resort is one of our less out-and-out crazy picks, but it does offer guests the chance to eat breakfast with an elephant (and we don't mean the overweight tourists next door). The 77-room hotel has a tranquil location surrounded by some of Southeast Asia’s most beautiful natural wonders, plus a cooking school, jungle expeditions and an elephant sanctuary where you can learn to ride on or even bathe with the gentle giants. Bed and breakfast packages start around ¥1,500 a night.
Find it: www.goldentriangle.com
The Marina Bay Sands is the most expensive hotel ever built, costing more than US$6.5 billion. And what a lot they got for that: 2,500 rooms, seven celebrity chef restaurants, two theaters, a museum, two floating crystal pavilions, an Olympic ice-skating rink and the world’s largest atrium casino, with more than 500 tables. We imagine this is where the developers (Las Vegas’s Sands Group) think they’re going to suck back some of that investment. We, however, recommend it for the 150-meter long infinity pool on the 55th-floor roof that’s reserved exclusively for hotel guests–it’s the world’s highest and will make you feel as if you are swimming among the clouds. Rooms start around ¥1,750 a night.
Find it: www.marinabaysands.com
The First World Hotel, a vast resort in Malaysia's Genting Highlands, Pahang, is the fourth largest hotel in the world by rooms (6,118) and was the outright largest until The Venetian in Las Vegas was expanded in 2008. What makes it unusual, beyond sheer size, is its gaudy color scheme. Not content with being housed in a building with 11 restaurants, a theme park out front, an indoor water park for children, a cineplex, Asia's first freefall simulator, a casino, 46,000 sq. meters of retail space in the basement and a huge replica of the Statue of Liberty, designers chose to snag additional attention by painting each tower of the hotel in a rainbow of colors. You can also reach the resort via the Genting Skyway, the world fastest cablecar, which travels at six meters a second.
Find it: www.rwgenting.com
More of an art museum than a hotel, Benesse House on Naoshima Island was built by Japanese architect Ando Tadao to house the art collection of the Benesse Corporation, a publishing company and the parent firm of the Berlitz language schools. The collection includes work by Giacometti, Jasper Johns, Sam Francis, Jackson Pollock and David Hockney. Every room has original artwork and there’s a Basquiat hanging in the restaurant. Guests can enjoy 24-hour access to the works, which are also dotted around the beaches and cliffs that surround the building, though the structure itself is the most enigmatic piece of art. Accommodation is costly. Rooms start around US$430 a night. If that’s too steep, you can visit the museum and its grounds for a mere US$12.
Find it: www.benesse-artsite.jp
The Imperial Boathouse luxury resort on the northeast coast of Koh Samui has a private beach, gardens and all the beautiful touches that you’d expect from a five-star hotel. The twist is the 34 teak rice barges which have been converted into luxury suites. The barges were all once used to transport food and other goods around Thailand but the hotel has found an elegant way to reuse them. All are spacious, with king-sized beds and sunken bathtubs, and the boat theme is continued throughout the hotel–even the swimming pool is in the shape of a rice barge. You can also get out on the water on your own with some sailing, canoeing, scuba diving and windsurfing in the resort's secluded bay. The boat suites start at ¥2,420, while simpler rooms in their eight low-rise buildings go for ¥1,576 and up.
Find it: www.imperialhotels.com
There are plenty of bizarre love hotels in Japan but the Hotel Candy Hall in Osaka is one of the strangest. It used to be called the Hotel Adonis and was famous for its Hello Kitty-themed S&M dungeon, complete with a plush Kitty doll wearing a ball gag, blindfold and barbed wire garter belt. Things were toned down slightly after the hotel changed hands, but you’ll still find a “pink” themed room with some Hello Kitty items to play out your cute Asian fantasies. There’s also a prison cell and a high school classroom. Rooms run on the standard love hotel rate, charging for a “rest” or an overnight stay, or simply by the hour. Expect to pay around US$300 for a night, or a quarter of that for a two-hour rest.
Find it: www.candy-hall.com
The owners call this place the Hang Nga Guesthouse, but the locals call it the Crazy House because of its freakish design. If Gaudi had tired of Barcelona and packed off to Vietnam, this is what he’d have built. Rather than using standard architectural plans as blueprints, architect Hang Viet Nga paints and draws sketches of what she wants and then hires local craftsmen to transform these into her buildings. She built the topsy-turvy hotel, complete with huge animal statues, tunnels, caves and a rooftop that is pure Dr. Seuss, after one of her previous creations was torn down by the socialist government for being too wild. Single rooms run from US$40-70, doubles from US$50-85.
Find it: www.crazyhouse.vn
Buried in the wilds of the Gobi Desert, the Three Camel Lodge aims to showcase the spectacular scenery of the desert without sacrificing too many home comforts. Accommodation is in gers, the traditional felt tents used by Mongolian herdsmen. Each features a king-sized bed, a private bathroom and a wood-burning stove. Most of the staff are locals and the accommodation is designed to meet sustainable design principles. Even the toiletries and moisturizers are made from camel milk. But the reason to come is the desert landscape and the star-filled sky. Three Camel Lodge was named one of National Geographic’s top 50 Ecolodges in 2009. Expect to pay around US$360 per couple per night for the deluxe gers with indoor bathrooms, or US$250 for the standard gers.
Find it: www.threecamellodge.com
The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong is (for now) the world’s highest hotel, beating Shanghai’s Park Hyatt when it opened in March. It has 312 rooms on floors 102-118 of the fourth tallest building in the world. Expect levels of luxury that would make a king gape: there are six restaurants and bars from the Chocolate Library on to Ozone–the highest place on Earth to get a drink. Rooms start at ¥4,000 a night as an opening offer that runs through August.
Find it: www.ritzcarlton.com
Capsule hotels are great. They feel like you’re bedding down in a cryogenic suspension chamber about to go into hyperspace. But luxury they are not. That is until designer Fumie Shibata of Design Studio S last year opened 9h, the world’s first boutique capsule hotel, in Kyoto. The sleeping spaces are around the same size as a traditional capsule, but the design is contemporary, sleek and stylish, with ambient light controls, Wi-Fi, decent sheets and Panasonic entertainment systems. The operators believe guests will spend around nine hours in the hotel (hence the name): one to shower, seven to sleep and one to relax, read and watch some TV, though if you really fall in love with your capsule, you can stay for up to 17 hours, all for around US$35.
Find it: http://9hours.jp
Currently under construction in Fiji, though stalled since the financial crisis of 2008, is the world’s first undersea hotel, the Poseidon. But until its finished, Asia’s only underwater option is in the Maldives, where the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island resort has an underwater restaurant called the Ithaa. It’s five meters below sea level with 180 degree views of the marine life above and around the bubble and has room for 14 diners, who pay US$120 for lunch or US$150 for a Maldivian-Western fusion dinner, wine from their 18,000-bottle wine cellar not included. Last year, the hotel started to offer the space out for overnight stays (see cover). It’s US$11,710 a night though, so if the pressure doesn’t give you a nosebleed, the bill certainly will. Those with a little less cash to burn can also stay above ground on one of their two private islands from US$600 a night. Either way, the resort can only be accesed via a 30-minute seaplane ride from Male, ensuring that you’re blissfully cut off from civilization for the duration of your stay.
Find it: http://bit.ly/E9ebE
On the outskirts of Jaipur lies the historic Amer Fort and a valley that now houses one of India’s boldest boutiques. Each of the Rasa Resort's 40 canvas “tents” is a 500 sq. ft structure with large bay windows and a high, sloping roof that forms a canopy over the bed. The esthetic is a mix of traditional Indian design and understated luxury, with everything constructed to play off the colors of the environment outside. Tents start at ¥1,450.
Find it: www.rasaresorts.in
This 16-acre eco-resort is tucked away in the south of Sri Lanka and is a perfect jumping-off spot for seeing some of this country’s stunning wildlife. Yala National Park is a couple of hours away and is one of the best places in the world to see elephants and leopards in the wild. Kumbuk River offers secluded chalets but we recommend the Elephant Villa, that sleeps up to eight people and has its own lounge, dining area and plunge pool. Rent it on a full-board basis from US$250 per couple, per night, with additional guests charged at US$75.
Find it: www.kumbukriver.com
China has become so good at copying European goods that they're now copying Europe too. Shenzhen's Interlaken Hotel is a combination resort and theme park in the style of an idealized Swiss alpine town. What it lacks in yodeling and lederhosen it makes up for with a luxury spa, a Gothic amusement park and that special brand of weirdness that comes only from China. Rooms start at ¥2,125 a night and go up to ¥5,500 for a suite with a view of the manmade lake.
Find it: http://bit.ly/p2jenN
Comments Add a public comment
Most Recent Comments
:-) Any one of these hotels offer life/death race against the local fauna? Damn monkeys.
Fascinating. Nice article, Nick.