Capella Bangkok

When Ben Taechaubol of Country Group Development first saw the 5.75-hectare plot on Charoenkrung Road in 2009, it was home to about thirty tenants, among them a fishery, and it took five years, he told The Peak, to relocate them equitably. "We knew straight away that something wonderful could be built there," he said. What was built is the Chao Phraya Estate: a 73-storey tower of Four Seasons residences flanked by two low hotels, the Four Seasons and Capella Bangkok.

Capella announced the hotel in December 2017 for the end of 2018, and it opened on 1 October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, as the group's first in Thailand. The whole estate stands on land leased from the Privy Purse Bureau, and its other hotel is the Four Seasons Bangkok. Andy Miller and Richard Scott-Wilson of Hamiltons designed Capella as a contemporary version of the Thai riverside pavilion, and in 2024 it was ranked first among the World's 50 Best Hotels.

The guest floors are single-loaded, about ten rooms to a floor, so every room looks at the Chao Phraya through floor-to-ceiling glass from its own balcony or veranda, and the villas sit at the water's edge with plunge pools; the Capella Living Room divides the public south of the site from the private north. Miller described patterning built from motifs, detail, screens and ornament, and the glass-fibre concrete screens take their scale from the older buildings of Charoenkrung, often described as Bangkok's oldest paved road, from the Old Customs House to the shophouses.

Sources: The Peak Singapore; Design and Architecture; PR Newswire; Country Group Development; The Nation; Kaohoon International; eHotelier; Capella Bangkok; Capella Bangkok