Amanpuri: How One Phuket Hotel Invented the Modern Asian Resort
A 40-pavilion hotel that banks refused to finance opened on a Phuket headland in 1988. Its villas, black-tiled pool and absence of a lobby became the model for luxury resorts across Asia.
In January 1988 a small hotel opened on a headland on the west coast of Phuket, above a crescent of sand called Pansea Beach. It had 40 guest pavilions, no reception desk, no lobby in the usual sense and no sign at the gate. Banks had declined to finance it, on the grounds that a resort with so few rooms could never pay. It was called Amanpuri, a name formed from Sanskrit words meaning place of peace, and it changed the way resorts were built across Asia and beyond.
An accident of house-hunting
The story, as it is usually told, begins with Adrian Zecha, an Indonesian-born publisher and hotelier who had been one of the founders of the Regent group. He was looking for a site for a holiday house in Phuket and found a former coconut plantation on a promontory over the Andaman Sea. The land was larger than a house required, and the house became a plan for a few villas for friends, and then a small hotel to accompany them. It is reported to have cost about US$4 million.
Ed Tuttle’s pavilions
The architect was Ed Tuttle, an American based in Paris. He did not design a building. He scattered separate pavilions among the palms on the hillside, each with a steep roof in the manner of the temples of Ayutthaya, the old Thai capital, each raised on a platform and reached by walkways and steps, with a salā, an open-sided pavilion, of its own. At the centre he placed a long swimming pool lined in black tile, flanked by open halls, from which a broad flight of steps descended to the beach.
Almost everything about it has since become a convention of the luxury resort: the villa as the unit of accommodation; the reference to local architecture, rendered with restraint; the dark infinity-edged pool; the absence of signs, desks and uniforms that announce a hotel; the very high number of staff for each guest, who seem to know your name without being told. In 1988 these were novelties.
What followed
Amanpuri was followed within a few years by Amandari and Amankila in Bali and Amanpulo in the Philippines, and the group now has properties around the world, among them Aman Tokyo, Aman Kyoto, Amanfayun and Amanyangyun. Its influence went further. The people who worked on the early Amans, and the architects they employed, among them Kerry Hill, Jean-Michel Gathy and Tuttle himself, went on to shape much of what is now thought of as Asian resort design, and brands from Six Senses to Rosewood work in a field that Amanpuri defined. Zecha himself left the company and later created Azumi, a ryokan brand, in Japan.
Amanpuri today
The resort now covers some 24 hectares and has, alongside the original 40 pavilions, more than 40 private villas of several bedrooms, each with its own pool and staff, which are let when their owners are away. It has four restaurants, a spa and a large wellness programme, and a fleet of boats for the islands of Phang Nga Bay. In 2026 it reopened after four months of enhancements.
It is not the newest resort in Phuket, where Rosewood and others now compete with it, and in Bangkok the group has built something quite different. But the black pool at the top of the steps, with the sea beyond the palms, remains one of the defining views of modern travel.