A Taste of Stylish Phuket
All this week, HotelChatter's roving correspondent Claire Duffett will be reviewing several beach hotels that she visited during her trip through Thailand. Got questions or suggestions? Send them to us and we'll have Claire answer them for you.
It took us a while to drag ourselves away from Koh Lanta but we were grateful we took time to explore the Andaman Sea’s other largest island, Phuket. We were particularly grateful that we took a chance and stayed in the city, away from the beach.
Phuket Town is one hip place. With its café-lined streets and residents who are stylish in that pretending-not-to-care way, it’s like the Williamsburg to Bangkok’s Manhattan. So it’s fitting that the capital of Thailand’s largest island offers some understated, ultra-chic boutique hotels.
Case-in-point: The Taste Phuket.
We spotted the unassuming hotel while walking along one of the main streets in the Old Town section of Phuket, which resembles a cross between Paris and Brooklyn. It looked like the store front for an Anthropologie clothing store. White, wrought-iron chandeliers, surrounded by beaded curtains line the hotel’s narrow lobby. Guests sit at tables playing classic board games—typical hipster activity—like Scrabble. Some visitors stop and play a few notes at the upright piano near the entrance.
Up a narrow wooden staircase, the rooms mimic the lobby’s white theme. They are a bit plain, but still tasteful, and the porch that the front rooms offer really make you feel like you’re lunching on a terrace in the Left Bank.
The doors to the bedroom are really strange though. Huge, semi-rotating glass doors take serious muscle to push open and require that you look out for people standing in the way who can be hit by the back swing.
The bathroom is a bit impractical too. It’s just a toilet, shower and sink surrounded by a white curtain that resembles a divider used in hospitals. Good luck maintaining the romance here and keeping bodily functions under wraps if you’re traveling with a lover.
It wasn’t until after we stopped in on the hotel that we realized that it’s related to the less-inspired Sri Lanta. Both are part of the Sri Hotels Group, and inexplicably, they charge far less for a night at Taste than at Lanta. Perhaps it’s the lack of a beach front, but a standard room costs 2,500 Baht, or about $75, compared to Lanta’s $180.
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