Hotel of the Week: The Star of The White Lotus Season 3 Just Might Be This Dreamy Resort

With no disrespect to Maui or Sicily, you cannot arrive at the private hilltop reception of Four Seasons Koh Samui, perched at the northwest corner of the island like a lookout over the trembling jungle and Gulf of Thailand, and conclude this isn’t most resplendent of them all. In the center of the open-air pavilion, where the fawning staff welcomes you with a tantalizing welcome drink and chilled herb-scented towels, a custom fountain burbles up through the top of a tree trunk-like pillar. The water spills over the sides, runs down through a halo-shaped pond of orchids, through the floor to the level below.

It’s a fitting symbol for the terrain of the resort, which begins at the highest point of the 42-acre property and cascades down the glittering sea. Seen through the lens of The White Lotus exploits, it might symbolize something else entirely, though it’s doubtful Bill Bensley had that in mind when he designed the hotel back in 2007.

Four Seasons Koh Samui was Bensley’s first full-service resort project, planned at a time when backpacking culture still dominated the island. He famously felled not a single palm on the former coconut plantation, bending his buildings around the landscape instead of vice versa. The grand teak-and-thatch hall, the treehouse-like spa, and 70 individual villas jut over lush ravines, stitched together by boardwalks and staircases and oriented to the water.

Every sea-facing wall, it seems, is an origami of wood and glass designed to be folded up, slid open, or cranked out to blur indoor from outdoor. Melting into one of the blocky rattan armchairs at the Koh Bar, watching the scenery at golden hour while a bartender anoints your passionfruit spritz with house-made vanilla cordial and chile tincture, is exactly the sort of dignified and do-nothing-luxurious activity this resort encourages.

The hotel touches ground at a pretty little beach (not as common as you’d think in Koh Samui) and a warm, calm cove. Guests will find the recently renovated pool deck here, lined in lounge chairs, wide daybeds, and four-poster cabanas with overhead fans and blue-and-white, peppermint-striped pillows. The same shade of blue—expressed in woven textiles, textured ceramics, mirror frames, and guest periodicals—brings levity to the rich, dark woodwork in the villas.

Many Samui resorts leap off a colonial-fantasy deep end (despite that Thailand was never anyone’s colony), while others disassociate and flee into the arms of hostile modernism. The Four Seasons takes neither approach. Could the egg-shaped soaking tub and mosquito-canopied bed, the courtyard-view shower and private plunge pool exist at any luxury beach resort from Tulum to Menorca? You bet. But the Siamese-heritage framework they inhabit creates a strong sense of place, along with the balance and symmetry revered in Thai design.

Will the guests of The White Lotus give a hoot about any of this? Unlikely. But it’ll be delightful to watch them cavort through the spaces nonetheless.