The waves at Natai Beach neither lap nor lull. They arrive in long, thick sets from the widescreen Andaman, breaking with enough force that you hear them inside the villa with the doors closed. This is not the placid, postcard Thailand of Gulf Coast bays, where the sea politely keeps its distance. It is the other side of the peninsula, facing west into nothing, and Iniala Beach House has built itself directly on its shore.

The salty sea air coming off those waves will make you inhale deeply. And arriving at one of just ten individually designed spaces will make you expel all your pent-up stress in one comically flamboyant exhale.

Because Iniala Beach House does in ninety seconds what your meditation app has been failing to do for eighteen months now – at, in fairness, considerably greater expense. The sea supplies the soundtrack throughout, present in every villa, audible through the wall of windows that face it, like an Om tone that reverberates in your ears long after checkout.

Whether you came for the sea, the chef’s table, or the frankly psychedelic design, you arrive at the same conclusion within an hour or two: this is your sign to surrender.

The Location

Iniala sits on Natai Beach, on the Thai mainland in Phang Nga rather than Phuket island itself. Just over the Sarasin Bridge, Phuket International Airport is around 25 minutes down the road, making arrival mercifully straightforward. Once you cross the threshold, however, the outside world effectively ceases to exist.

Natai is a long, unhurried stretch of sand with almost no commercial development along it. Its nearest neighbour is a mid-range family resort, though you’d barely know it; Iniala operates in its own sealed-off world.

What makes this coastline special though, is its exposure. Facing the open sea with little to interrupt the horizon, Natai picks up considerably more wave action than the sheltered bays further south in Phuket proper. There is very little in the way of islands or landmasses to break incoming swells, and motorised water sports are banned, which only deepens the sense of having stumbled onto a stretch of coast that the rest of the world has overlooked.

It’s a good spot for playing in the surf, and there’s a free, kinetic energy to it that feels like a deliberate counterpoint to the glassy-calm infinity pools you find at more manicured luxury resorts. The hotel rightly acknowledges this is a strong suit and plays its hand here, providing bodyboards. A note of caution though: during the monsoon season (roughly May to October), prevailing winds push swells directly onshore and conditions can be genuinely powerful, and swimming is discouraged at best, outright banned at times.

Character & Style

The effervescence of the Andaman feels like a natural foil to Iniala’s intensely curated interiors, almost as if it’s the ocean that’s been shipped in; enlisted to stop you taking all that design too seriously.

And everything is hyper-styled, it has to be said. Staying here is a cinematic experience that could border on ostentatious, but the service is so warm and personal, the design flourishes so idiosyncratic, that it never falls into that category.

Iniala grounds its philosophy in hospitalitas, the Latin origin of the word hospitality, meaning generosity towards guests. From that foundation grows what it describes as its four pillars: gastronomy, art, culture and community. That sounds, on paper, like the kind of brand language you can safely ignore, but it is genuinely felt across the property. The pillars run through the resort itself, and find practical expression through a programme of structured off-site experiences – longtail boat trips through Phang Nga’s limestone karsts, cooking classes at organic farms, encounters with monks and artisans – each designed to explore a different pillar through the lens of Thai life.

The art alone runs to more than forty contemporary pieces by South-East Asian artists, exhibited throughout the residences and public areas: a living gallery rather than decorative wallpaper. Although, come to think of it, some of it is decorative wallpaper too. Elsewhere, eleven international designers were each given a space to do with as they wished, with a single brief: every room had to be out of the ordinary, yet practical and comfortable enough to actually live in. The results are gloriously uneven in the best possible way.

The Campana Lounge (designed by the late Fernando Campana and his brother Humberto, the celebrated Brazilian designers) is the heart of the communal areas. The most striking detail is the wall: hundreds of classic Thai blue-and-white ceramics – plates, bowls, pedestal dishes – clustered across the surface in cresting, wave-like swells. A nod to Bangkok’s Wat Arun and its broken-porcelain mosaics, here it’s translated into something looser and more oceanic. In other hands it could tip into the gaudy, and those denim-shrouded chairs won’t be to every taste, but boy is it fun.

Out in the entrance courtyard, ceramic columns rise from a reflecting pool, each encrusted with hundreds of glazed pieces in soft celadon and dusty blue, clinging to the surface like barnacles on a sea-pier. They took the Campanas around 600 hours to make, and hidden among the clustered forms are elephants, flowers, miniature teapots and other small surprises rewarding a closer look. It’s where Iniala’s twin pillars of art and culture quite literally intertwine.

At Iniala Beach House, gastronomy is the pillar that pulls hardest: Aulis, acclaimed British chef Simon Rogan’s 15-seat chef’s table, is one of just two Michelin-starred restaurants in Thailand outside Bangkok, and a meaningful proportion of guests are here for the table first and the villa second. Conversations around the pool – or, indeed, on the beach – sooner or later drift toward what was eaten the night before.

There’s a dense kitchen garden on the grounds too, which supplies the herbs and edible flowers that find their way onto Aulis’s tasting menu. You can take the Rogan out of Cartmel, but you can’t take the…

Alongside flush foodies, Iniala attracts a glamorous set. Kim Kardashian spent the lead-up to her wedding here back in 2014, booking out the whole property. It was featured on the show for a few fleeting seconds, even, as if that matters. We mentioned to a Thai acquaintance in Phuket we were staying at Iniala. Their reply: “That’s where politicians and celebrities stay”. “And spies”, they added for some reason, eyeing us up and down trying to work out which, if any, we were.

Well, we couldn’t reveal that, could we?

The property carries a weight that the design doesn’t immediately reveal. What is now Iniala was once Mark Weingard’s own beach house. He was in it when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami hit Natai Beach. He and seventeen others survived by climbing onto the roof. Eleven people died on Natai Beach that morning.

Rather than rebuilding what was lost, Weingard reimagined the site as something new, with design director Graham Lamb overseeing the project and the dream team of international designers given a space each. The traditional southern Thai house at the centre of the property was knocked down and rebuilt, and now anchors the more avant-garde spaces around it; the teak-clad carved roofs of the newer buildings draw on Thai vernacular forms and traditional healing motifs.

Weingard’s wider story is one of loss, and Iniala is, in many ways, his answer to it. The Inspirasia Foundation receives 10% of all room revenue directly and has donated over 15 million euros to health, disability and education projects across South-East Asia since 2003. It is not a footnote, but the reason the place exists.

Rooms

There is no formal check-in as such. Staff are just there as you pull up, addressing you by name as they open the car door. So this is what being a celebrity feels like. You’re escorted directly to your room without having to go through the unseemly business of announcing yourself, a lemongrass foam served from an espuma gun and a chilled towel pressed into your hands before you’ve quite worked out what’s happening. Somewhere along the way, passports are taken, returned a little later giftwrapped with a ribbon. It’s all very suave and sophisticated.

If you do have questions, you simply message the good-humoured staff via WhatsApp, and anything you request is swiftly brought over: a butler-type service that bypasses the need for traditional desk interactions. And no, it’s not AI – there are some carefully placed grammatical mistakes and charming semantic choices on the other end of that phone that prove otherwise.

Staff outnumber guests several times over, underwriting the day-to-day experience. It’s VIP service all the way. With only ten villas, suites and a penthouse, that level of attention isn’t just aspirational, it’s structurally possible.

On the bed, your name has been spelled out in fresh flower petals and orchids, alongside neatly folded towel origami. A welcome platter is ready and waiting: an assortment of local dried fruits (pineapple, mango, nuts) alongside cheeses, local honey, sweets and cookies. After a long journey, it lands well. The macarons were, admittedly, a little lurid, but we were told the chef is working on a tamarind and ginger pastille replacement, which sounds considerably more promising.

We stayed in the Siamese suite, designed by Thai designer Eggarat Wongcharit, who also turned his eye to the adjoining Golden Temple Bell Spa. He is the only Thai designer among the eleven international names commissioned at Iniala, and has spent his career arguing that traditional Thai craft is not folk heritage to be preserved behind glass but a live design vocabulary capable of speaking on any international stage. The suite is where that argument is made most forcefully.

Wongcharit conceived the suite’s furniture as both form and ritual object: the bed and sofa are woven from bamboo in shapes that reference the silkworm cocoon and the temple stupa simultaneously, and hang from the ceiling rather than resting on the floor. The ornate detailing that covers the walls and ceiling is the work of a different hand: Thai artist Korakot, whose dense, swirling bamboo installation envelops the entire room, lending it the quality of being held inside something organic.

After a night on the circular mattress, held in the embrace of bamboo, we wondered why all beds aren’t this shape. The coffee table, though, was the piece we kept returning to: a low, white mosaic form with undulating, lobed edges, almost topographic, almost coastal. Whether or not it was the intention, it read to us like a map of Phang Nga Bay rendered in miniature. It is a room whose references only deepen the longer you spend in it.

Everywhere you look, something has been considered, shaped, placed: weirdly wonderful, and entirely deliberate. The wildness of the Andaman, framed through those windows, is the natural counterpoint to all that intention, the thing that keeps the room from tipping into pure exhibition.

Floor-to-ceiling windows face the sea, and the motorised curtain mechanism is one of those small, satisfying details that lodge in the memory. Talk about a big reveal. A few steps off the deck and you’re on the sand, and close enough to the water for the oceanic white noise to make sleep both immediate and deep (or maybe it was that massive tasting menu and wine flight we’d only finished an hour prior).

The outdoor shower is a design moment that catches you off guard: swathed floor-to-wall in cascading tropical foliage, with ferns, monstera leaves and white orchids tumbling from every surface. In the corner, a turtle incense holder releases smoky, sandalwoody resins cut with something vegetal and damp. Showering here feels faintly illicit, like you’ve gone rogue and you’re nude under Ton Sung waterfall a few miles inland. Our suite shared a pool with the villa next door, which does mean the outdoor deck falls short of absolute privacy; worth knowing before you start belting out your favourite shower song. Oh, ours? George Michael’s ‘Outside’, of course.

Back inside, and the bathroom is stunning, with the curling, come hither bamboo motif not letting up. Amenities go well beyond the usual vanity kit: Dyson Supersonic hairdryers, complimentary, bottomless Acqua Panna mineral water, and Marvis, the crème de la crème of toothpaste. There’s also a lemongrass and geranium shampoo and conditioner from Diptyque, which leaves your hair feeling so soft you start to understand why celebrities always look the way they do. That, and botox.

Anyway, try buying that shampoo back home; there’s a waiting list for it on the John Lewis website that’s reportedly several years long. Perhaps you’ve gotten off lightly; they do currently stock Diptyque hair mist, and it’s priced at £2,066.67 per litre.

The disparate group of designers is perhaps Iniala’s masterstroke. They’ve pulled off something very clever here: each suite and villa boasts that spark of eccentricity that makes you feel that whatever room you’re in, it’s the one, the highlight, the most coveted. The only constant is the sea, framed through every window, and you breathe it all in, facing forward into the horizon of your life as much as actually squinting at the ocean.

Elsewhere, the more theatrical instincts of individual designers are given full rein. The Penthouse (where the Kardashians stayed) for instance, is conceived as one continuous holistic environment, with the bed cantilevered from above and a giant whale tail sculpture appearing to leap from the sea straight into the pool: the detail that earns the property its ‘iconoclastic’ billing, no doubt.

Although the hotel welcomes children, the villas and suites are decidedly adult spaces. You’d be bloody worried about young Tarquin unravelling the bamboo or smashing a bottle of that prodigious shampoo, it has to be said. Some rooms lean harder into this than others: the Boudoir Suite, with its Swarovski-laden side tables and shimmering drinks trolley in the form of a vintage motorcycle, leaves little ambiguity about its intended guest. All that said, there is a Kids Club, and it’s no afterthought – treehouses, caves, a costume shop and its own theatre. Chuck them in there till checkout.

But back to those rooms. Each embraces an unapologetic, idiosyncratic interior, with no design language softened or hedged to keep the baseline happy. Staying for a few days surrounded by hanging cocoon beds, swirling bamboo ceilings and coffee tables shaped like coastlines is enough to make you start cataloguing the safe choices back home.

Facilities & Spa

With the sand, the sea, and a room that keeps revealing new details every time you look up, standard resort notions of ‘facilities’ feel almost beneath Iniala Beach House. Huffing and puffing on an elliptical or getting tangled up in a cable crossover is a perverse way to spend a morning with the beach and big blue right there, but there is a gym. A well-appointed one, in fact, with a boxing ring, Concept 2 SkiErg and Wattbike, which is more than most five stars manage.

The beachfront infinity pool is the natural centre of the property, with aftersun, mosquito repellent and suntan lotion all laid out poolside, small touches that matter when the nearest 7-Eleven is a long drive away.

Beyond the pool sits the Cinema of Nature: a 160-inch screen with state-of-the-art surround sound, the room again designed by those prolific Campana Brothers. Its walls are clad in real coconut skin and there’s their famous Cipria sofa in here, rendered in a limited edition green. Yes, we know you’re thinking actual nature is ten feet away, but it’s ideal for those occasionally (very) stormy Southern Thai evenings.

The Pearl Spa is adorned in its namesake material and offers treatments that go some way to restoring both purity and beauty, two qualities this writer arrived conspicuously short on. There’s also the Golden Temple Bell Spa, covered in gold leaf and inscribed with Buddhist texts translated into English. The Thai herbal steam room will lift you out of any jet-lagged malaise.

Should you surprise yourself and all the staff and get the urge to venture out, the hotel can arrange canoe trips into the sea caves and hidden lagoons of Phang Nga Bay (particularly beautiful at night, when bioluminescent plankton lights up the water inside the caves), a trip to Ko Tapu (the limestone pinnacle from The Man with the Golden Gun), or simply bikes to borrow for pedalling past local temples and fishing villages. Cooking classes, Muay Thai and sunset horse rides are also on offer.

It is, of course, the sea that is the hotel’s most natural facility. This is the kind of holiday you can pack lightly for: all you really need is a couple of swimsuits and a few outfits for the evenings, because you’ll spend most of the day playing in those waves anyway.

Food & Drink

Who needs a poolside pizzeria, an ‘international’ buffet and a pan-Asian place when you have a singular hotel restaurant as good as this? Iniala has arguably become best known for Aulis, the hotel’s magnum opus if you will.

At Simon Rogan’s 15-seat chef’s table concept, he champions hyper-local Thai produce through the same farm-to-table philosophy he has honed at his three Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cumbria, reinterpreted entirely through Thai terroir and ingredients. Now when you see him back on British tele looking all tanned, healthy and happy, his sunnier disposition makes total sense.

In 2026, Aulis retained its star for the second year running (one of just two in wider Phuket), and restaurant manager Arsen Brahaj also picked up the Michelin Service Award for Thailand. Dining here, that latter award makes just as much sense as the former; Brahaj is a class act from beginning to end, a real craftsman, suavely guiding service with an assured hand and precise pours.

Choosing highlights from a hugely accomplished tasting menu almost does Aulis a disservice. Each course is as intricately designed and idiosyncratic as the rooms. And just as those rooms come together to form a coherent resort, the meal coalesces to tell one story about this stretch of coast. Come to think of it, that might be the whole idea.

Hey, but if forced to choose: four snacks in the lounge set the tone, among them a Klong Phai Farm chicken wing lacquered with Thalang honey mead, makrut lime leaf and pickled jalapeño from Khok Kloi, which tells you everything about Rogan’s approach here; myopically sourced but rich in inspiration.

At the chef’s table, a Phang Nga squid with smoked tomato and Rayong wasabi opened beautifully, and the day boat coral trout with toasted koji butter and burnt purple eggplant was a standout. The ‘main’ course was 76-day aged wagyu striploin, arriving alongside a toasted crumpet with bone marrow and a massaman-inspired curry sauce, a pairing that sounded experimental on paper but landed with absolute conviction.

To close, the Pa Khlok 90% dark chocolate with Phuket mulberry and sacha inchi praline, the Aulis take on Rogan’s signature anvil dessert, recognisable across his restaurants from L’Enclume to Hong Kong, here reinterpreted through Thai ingredients. It tasted as dramatic as it looked, with a sharp, crisp clarity that made fifteen courses fold away into my back pocket.

Do note that Aulis closes after service on 17 May 2026 for a seasonal break and menu refresh, reopening at the end of October.

Phew. Wake up, it’s time for breakfast, handled by the Campana Lounge, which also covers all-day dining, a more global affair. Breakfast is served à la carte. It’s a little ordinary by comparison, though one of the Aulis chefs is currently involved in overhauling the menu, and signs are encouraging. The shakshuka is genuinely good, as is the Thai granola. The cinnamon buns deserve a mention, too; just lovely.

Should you want to eat off-property, Rabiang Lay Seafood Restaurant, a little further along the beach, is popular with locals, and Thanoon Seafood Restaurant is around 15 minutes by car and Michelin-recognised Baan Rearn Mai is around 20 minutes away. Ask the hotel to arrange a driver; Grab is unreliable in this part of the world.

Ideal For…

Couples and honeymooners. Privacy here is structural, not aspirational, and the property runs on first-name terms throughout. Request one of the beachfront suites for the most direct sand-to-bed ratio. Just be aware some suites share a pool with the adjoining suite in the same villa, so choose accordingly. Each villa has its own pool.

Design obsessives. Eleven distinct creative voices on a single site, held together by a Thai vernacular shell. Ask for a tour of the other rooms; the staff are happy to show you around, and no two are remotely alike.

Serious eaters. Book Aulis well in advance; it seats fifteen and fills up fast. Take the wine pairing; Brahaj’s selections are half the experience. And the beauty of staying on-site is that you can roll straight from the table to your bed without troubling a taxi.

Charity-minded travellers. A portion of room revenue goes to funding health, disability and education projects across South-East Asia. You’re not just staying somewhere beautiful; you’re funding something meaningful. Rare at this level, where there’s often a lot of talk and not enough action.

It’s perhaps less suited to those craving a resort with seven restaurants and a sprawling kids’ complex, or anyone who needs constant stimulation beyond the property gates. The nearest nightlife is a bridge and a world away.

Why Stay?

There are plenty of clichés about finding an undeveloped beach in Thailand. Natai, for now, remains the real thing: uncommercialised, largely unknown outside Thailand, and possessed of that open-ocean character its more sheltered rivals simply cannot replicate.

Iniala rewards those who stay put. The surf gets into your sleep. The design gets into your head. The food gets into conversations you’ll be having months later. And the knowledge that 10% of what you’re paying is going directly to the Inspirasia Foundation means the guilt of spending this much money on a holiday is, for once, genuinely blunted.

Go for the waves, the seclusion, the food, and the feeling that you have found something most visitors to Thailand have not.

Room rates at Iniala Beach House Thailand start from 39,725 baht (£896) per night (Pool Residences) and Villas start from 129,200 baht (£2,914) per night. There is a two-night minimum stay. The Aulis tasting menu is priced separately. Book direct on ialathailand.com for the best rates and complimentary airport transfers.

Address: Iniala Beach House, Khok Kloi, Amphoe Takua Thung, Phang Nga

Website: iniala.com/iniala-beach-house

Around forty-five minutes south of the international airport, Phuket Old Town is the historic heart of the island, its storied soul where the rest can occasionally be a little superficial, or, at times, downright seedy.

A small grid of impossibly attractive streets that grew rich on tin mining in the late nineteenth century, the old town’s shophouses were built by Hokkien Chinese merchants who married into local Thai families, and their Peranakan descendants still run many of them today.

The buildings themselves are what most people come to photograph: rows of two-storey Sino-Portuguese shophouses in faded pastel, all arched windows, tiled five-foot ways and ornate stuccowork. Most are now cafes, fashion and jewellery boutiques, small museums and, most famously, restaurants. 

Because what keeps people here longer than they planned is the food: roti slapped and fried fresh to order, fearsome curries with coils of fresh fermented noodles, laughably cute dim sum, old-school Hokkien kopitiams thick with patina, and a Sunday Walking Street that turns the old town’s main artery into a street feast every weekend.

Phuket Old Town sits on the opposite side of the island from the main beach resort strips of Patong, Karon and Kata, and sits in stark contrast to those places, too; the vibe here is regal and refined, the mood less showy. Most visitors spend a single afternoon here between beach days, but the ones who know the island better book a hotel and stay for longer.

Choosing the right accommodation for the old town, then, is a different exercise from booking in Patong or Cherngtalay. The brief here isn’t beach access, infinity pools or sundowner views; it’s walkability, heritage character, and how close you are to the food. We’ve stayed in all six of the hotels below, alongside many more that didn’t make the cut, whether that’s because the rooms were tired, the location was old town in name only, or something didn’t quite click in terms of perceived value.

Here, then, are the best hotels in Phuket Old Town. None of them are beach hotels, and none of them pretend to be. The nearest swimmable sand is half an hour away by car, but what they offer instead is something rarer in Phuket; a sense of place, walkable streets, and proximity to some of the best food on the island.

Hotel Verdigris Phuket Old Town

Ideal for design-conscious couples, food-obsessed travellers, and anyone who finds resort hotels a bit hermetic…

On Yaowarat Road and built in keeping with the heritage architecture around it, Hotel Verdigris is the debut hotel project of Pichakorn ‘Peach’ Phanichwong, a young Phuket-born Peranakan Hokkien who opened the place in 2022 as a tribute to the Peranakan culture that shaped the old town. The design takes inspiration from Martina Rozells, the Phuket-born Thai-Portuguese wife of Francis Light, using her story as a lens for the Chinese, Thai, Malay and European influences fused into Peranakan identity.

A tight, fourteen-room boutique affair, its interiors lean into the verdigris palette the hotel takes its name from – oxidised copper tones, brass details, a little old-world glamour. Jazz drifts down the corridors, and the staircases are photogenic enough that you’ll find yourself reaching for your phone on the way to breakfast.

Speaking of which, breakfast is the move that elevates the whole property to something truly remarkable. You choose your morning order from a curated menu at check-in, and the next day it’s collected fresh from the shophouse and served at your table; kanom jeen, dim sum, kaya toast, the whole local repertoire, many of them Michelin-recommended. Western options (eggs, toast, the usual) are available too, made fresh in-house, but they’re not why you’re here. You’re here for the island’s best hotel breakfast, one with a grounding sense of place, and arguably the single best reason to stay here.

Verdigris itself sits in an excellent spot for exploring on foot. The photogenic Soi Rommanee, the Sunday Walking Street Market on Thalang, the old town museums, and a clutch of the area’s best restaurants (Raya, Charm Dining Gallery, Royd, Blue Elephant) are all within a few minutes’ stroll. The hotel runs a free shuttle anywhere around the old town, which is a nice touch in the heat. 

If those temperatures do get too much, there’s a small marble-lined swimming pool tucked into the courtyard, and a private rooftop plunge pool reserved for guests of the top-category Copper Junior Suite. Adults-only means a grown-up atmosphere whichever tier you’re in; no buffet queues, no kids’ clubs, no resort scrum.

Prices for the entry-level Solo Room start from around 6,900 baht (£160) per night in low season (May to October), rising to roughly 8,500–8,800 baht (£200–£205) for a Brass Room at peak (December to February). Rates include breakfast.

You can read our full review of Hotel Verdigris here.

Address: 154 Yaowarat Rd, Tambon Talat Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: hotelverdigris.com

HOMA Phuket Town

Ideal for digital nomads, long-stay travellers, and families wanting space without resort prices…

HOMA sits about ten minutes by Grab to the north of the old town, set down a cul-de-sac in a residential pocket of Ratsada district. Rather than the beach, guests here treat the old town as their primary anchor and playground, and nothing in the central grid offers what HOMA does.

Which is, co-living rather than a standard hotel stay. The 505-unit complex is part hotel, part serviced apartment block, part small neighbourhood. Kitchenettes have hobs, big fridges and even freezers. The WiFi runs on three networks, there’s a co-working space and soundproofed call booths. A fitness centre offers round-the-clock classes, alongside a cinema, a kids’ playroom, and a pet-friendly policy. The headline facility is the 80-metre rooftop pool, reportedly the longest in Phuket, with a 50-metre Olympic lap section. And the residents actually use the common spaces.

You can book a night, a week or a month, with rates that flex accordingly. The HOMA app handles everything from housekeeping requests to community noticeboards, where, on a recent visit, a missing pet bearded dragon was being collectively hunted by the residents.

For the price, it’s superb value, particularly for anyone who’d otherwise feel claustrophobic in a standard hotel room for weeks at a time. The trade-off is the location. The nearest swimmable beach is Patong, around half an hour by car, and the immediate surroundings (motorbike rental, local eateries, Chillva Market, Central Festival mall) are functional rather than pretty. But if you’re choosing between this and a generic city hotel, HOMA wins on every count that matters; on facilities, on flexibility, and on the simple fact that you can cook a meal, do a load of washing, take a video call without booking a meeting room, and feel like you actually live somewhere that looks after you for the duration of your stay.

Prices start from around 1,500 baht (£35) per night for short stays in low season, with high-season rates climbing to roughly 3,000–3,500 baht (£70–£80). Significantly reduced monthly rates are available.

You can read our full review of HOMA Phuket Town here.

Address: 3, 41 Soi Samkong 1, Ratsada, Amphoe Meuang, Phuket

Website: homa.co

Royal Phuket City

Ideal for business travellers, conference delegates, and families wanting facilities and a central base…

The Royal Phuket City is the established four-star option in the area; nineteen storeys of glass and concrete on Phangnga Road, set slightly back from the heritage core but still within easy walking distance of central Thalang and Soi Rommanee. The Atrium lobby – vast, high-ceilinged, with a pianist tickling the ivories and a singer doing a polite turn into the evening – calls to mind the grand old hotels of Bangkok, and you won’t find many like it elsewhere in the old town.

With 251 rooms and nine event spaces (including a 1,637 square metre Grand Ballroom), it does a brisk trade in business meetings, weddings and conference groups, and it shows in the lobby. There’s a steady churn of suited delegates picking up keycards, and strangers and stragglers of all stripes clinking ice in heavy-bottomed tumblers, passing some time until dinner. 

That anonymity is part of the appeal. After a long day eating and drinking the old town, slipping back here quietly, into a plush, well-appointed room for a good night’s sleep is sometimes all you actually need. Opulence beyond that feels beside the point when you’re so close to the action. The rooms themselves are dated in the way that mid-2010s South East Asian four-stars tend to be; comfortable and spacious rather than design-magazine-worthy, but at the price point, that’s a fair trade.

What distinguishes Royal Phuket City in this list is its facilities-to-price ratio. There’s an outdoor pool with separate adult and children’s areas, an enormous fitness centre run by Workout Club, the Royal Wellness Spa, three on-site restaurants (the very capable Yan Long for Cantonese-leaning Chinese, the rooftop TWIST Restaurant & Bar – great views – and the all-day 154 Bakery), and indoor parking for 350 cars, with EV charging available. A free hotel EV shuttle bus stops right outside, which makes getting around the wider city straightforward.

It won’t suit anyone looking for boutique character, but the Royal Phuket City will suit those who want a full-service hotel, the full facilities stack, and a location that lets you walk into the heritage quarter for dinner. The buffet breakfast on the nineteenth floor, with its sea-and-city panorama, is a highlight of staying here.

Prices for the entry-level Premier Superior start from around 2,550 baht (£57) per night in low season, rising to roughly 4,700 baht (£105) at peak.

Address: 154 Phangnga Rd, Tambon Talat Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: royalphuketcity.com

Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town

Ideal for Bonvoy loyalists, business stays, and travellers who want a familiar standard close to the action…

Sitting on Soi Surin directly opposite the totemic (if your totem is rendered in bright mustard) Surin Circle Clock Tower, the Courtyard is a contemporary 248-room hotel built on the bones of the old Metropole. For a generation, this was the grand dame of Phuket Old Town’s hotel scene. It reopened under the Marriott banner in 2021, with the architectural shell kept intact but the old-world formality swapped for something calmer: soaring ceilings and white columns are still there, the galleried upper floor still overlooks the lobby, but the chandeliers have given way to drum-shade pendants and the palette has been pulled back to muted greys and pale marble. Heritage shell, contemporary interior. 

Inside the rooms it’s pure international Courtyard, though; sleek work desk, ergonomic chair, plush bedding, flat-screen, free, fast WiFi, and the dependable consistency that’s the whole point of staying with a chain of this specific standing.

There are four dining outlets across the property. Krua Talad Yai on the third floor is the all-day restaurant, a marketplace-style room with open kitchens serving Southern Thai and international dishes, though convenience really is the main reason to eat here when there’s so much amazing Thai food just outside the hotel’s door. The buffet breakfast (THB 499, around £11, per person if not already included in your rate) is a sprawling spread.

Talung Lounge on the lobby level does coffee and pastries by day, cocktails and Clock Tower views by night. Kolae Pool Bar on the fourth floor handles poolside drinks and light bites with a view across Phuket Town. The most interesting of the four is Yue, a Cantonese restaurant on the second floor that opened in 2023 under chef Kenny Chang; the dim sum buffet (THB 555 per person, all you can eat) made the Top 25 Restaurants in Phuket list in 2024 and is a draw for locals as well as guests.

There’s also a 24-hour fitness centre with a Thai boxing area, an outdoor pool with a children’s section, a kids’ club, free on-site parking, and a 660-square-metre pillarless Grand Ballroom that does brisk trade in weddings and conference groups. The Sunday Walking Street Market on Thalang is a ten-minute walk away, which means you’re close enough to wander out for dinner but far enough that the market’s noise and impenetrable foot traffic don’t reach you.

The trade-off is character. The Courtyard could sit comfortably in any major Southeast Asian city, and aside from the lobby it doesn’t pretend otherwise; what you get is a competent international four-star. For Bonvoy-points collectors, business travellers, or anyone wanting a known quantity in a part of Thailand where the boutique scene can be hit and miss, that’s exactly the appeal. Service is consistently strong, and the position on the southern edge of the heritage grid is genuinely useful: walkable into old town one way, and a clean run south out of the city the other, without having to negotiate the tight one-way streets that can make old town traffic a slow-moving puzzle.

Hey, and why not check out our review of the Courtyard by Marriott’s outpost over in Patong while you’re here?

Prices for an entry-level Deluxe start from around 3,050 baht (£68) per night in low season, rising to roughly 4,850 baht (£108) at peak.

Address: 1 Soi Surin, Talad Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: marriott.com

Casa Blanca Boutique Hotel Phuket

Ideal for solo travellers, couples on a budget, and old town first-timers…

Of all six hotels here, the exterior of Casa Blanca looks most like the picture-perfect old town you came to see. A whitewashed Sino-Portuguese building in the heart of the heritage quarter, it has a small rooftop pool, an indoor garden cafe under a vaulted skylight, and a chandelier-hung lobby that does cool refuge from the midday heat better than almost anywhere in town. The owners have clearly resisted the temptation to over-restore; the building’s quirks (a tiny lift used mostly for luggage, some street noise from the bar opposite, a steep spiral staircase up to the rooftop pool) are still present, but so is the soul.

Three room types are on offer: the 25-square-metre Superior for couples, the 35-square-metre Deluxe with city or courtyard views (and an extra bed option for three), and the 50-square-metre Family Suite, which has a master bedroom with a king bed, a junior bedroom with twin beds, a small living room and a microwave, working well for small groups or families with older children. 

There’s no in-house restaurant, no spa, and breakfast is served à la carte rather than buffet, but the staff are wonderful, the best thing about the place. They’ll happily organise tours, transfers, motorbike rental and onward travel to the Phi Phi islands or the wider Andaman coast, and they’ll throw in a few ‘hidden gem’ restaurant recommendations if you ask nicely.

What makes Casa Blanca worth choosing over the generic mid-range options elsewhere in Phuket Old Town is the location. Sure, rooms could do with a lick of paint and there are slight soundproofing issues, but you’re right in the mix of the old town rather than on its edge, with the night markets, the best of the food, and the prettiest streets all within a five-minute walk. That counts for a lot.

Prices start from around 2,000 baht (£44) per night in low season for a Deluxe King with pool view, rising to roughly 2,800 baht (£63) at peak.

Address: 26 Phuket Road, Talad Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: casablancaphuket.com

The Memory at On On Hotel

Ideal for history buffs, film fans and heritage hunters…

The Memory at On On is the oldest hotel on Phuket. Built in 1927 by a Hokkien tin merchant named Yoktiew Saepae, designed under the supervision of a Penang architect, and originally called Un Un, it has been in continuous operation for nearly a century and now occupies a focal position on Phangnga Road. Visitors of a certain vintage might recognise it from the opening scenes of Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000), when it was still a backpacker dive with 180-baht fan rooms.

The 2012 restoration brought it firmly into boutique territory while leaving the architectural character intact: exposed brick walls, handcrafted shutters, the original wooden staircases, and a central courtyard (a chim chaeh, in Hokkien) that opens to the sky to flood the ground floor with natural light. Rooms are spread across four categories (Superior, Deluxe, Junior Suite and the Memory Suite) and individually themed around the trades and crafts of nineteenth-century Phuket; the Sewing Room, the Carpenter Room, the Photographer Room, the Travellers Room, and the Red Peony, which leans into Peranakan red and gold for a maximalist take on romance.

Facilities are deliberately sparse, an acknowledgement of the constraints of being so central. But what you do get is a 24-hour reception, a tour desk, complimentary drinks and snacks in the lobby, and a level of period detail that no new build could replicate. Kanta Phuket, the independent Modern Peranakan restaurant that occupies a side unit of the same building, is a thoughtful place to eat without leaving the property – its menu reworking Hokkien-Malay family recipes with a more contemporary touch – and you’re a two-minute walk from some of the old town’s best food on Soi Rommanee and Thalang. 

Come for the history, stay for the courtyard, and book the Junior Suite they’ve themed as ‘The Beach’ if you want to wake up in DiCaprio’s old room.

Prices start from around 2,400 baht (£53) per night in low season for a Deluxe, rising to roughly 3,250 baht (£72) at peak.

Address: 19 Phangnga Rd, Talat Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: thememoryhotel.com

By 7am, the queue outside Heng Heng is already doing what Phuket queues do; swallow both pavement and morning whole. A few streets over, the pot at O Cha Rot has been simmering beef balls longer than most people waiting for them have been alive. And somewhere on Thalang Road, Roti Thaew Nam is frying its first roti of the day over charcoal, but is just two hours from selling out until tomorrow. Welcome to Phuket Old Town, the world’s best place to eat breakfast.

The young, effervescent owner of Hotel Verdigris, Pichakorn ‘Peach’ Phanichwong, shares this hyperbole. She’s obsessive about local food, and keeps a personal Phuket guide, which she calls her Peachilin Guide; a list of her favourite spots to eat in the city. She knows which aunty at Mae Ting makes the most aromatic curry sauce, what morning the best cook at Boonrat always takes off, and the crucial preference for an ok rong over a nam dok mai when making mango sticky rice. It is, I suspect, a more useful document than that there Michelin, and the first thing she’ll want to discuss when you check in is not your room but your appetite.

And appetite, it turns out, is the whole organising principle of Hotel Verdigris. At check-in, instead of being pointed towards where a buffet will be held the next morning, you’re invited to choose a set menu drawn from a bespoke selection of the Old Town’s shophouses and kitchens, many Michelin-listed, all Peach-accredited. The hotel places the orders. The food arrives hot. You sit under the morning light eating a table’s worth of Phuket’s proudest generational cooking, while everyone else queues in the rising Southern heat for the same plates. It is the finest hotel breakfast I have ever eaten.

The Location

Sandy beaches and a fair amount of unearned bling are the hallmarks of a Phuket holiday, but those in the know will tell you that staying in the Old Town is the more rewarding move. The quarter is legendary for its food scene, with one of the highest concentrations of Michelin pin-drops anywhere on the planet. Hotel Verdigris puts you directly in the thick of it, within walking distance of them all.

You’re on Yaowarat Road, which threads through the Old Town’s most storied streets: Thalang, Phang Nga and Dibuk. Just make sure you tell your taxi driver Phuket Yaowarat, not Bangkok Yaowarat, or you’ll be in for a very long, very expensive ride. Anyway the Verdigris is around 45 minutes’ drive from Phuket International Airport and can arrange a transfer if you’d rather not negotiate the notorious taxi rank.

Yaowarat itself rewards a slow wander. A Pong Mae Sunee, a tiny street stall awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand for several years on the bounce, sits on this very road, turning out charcoal-cooked coconut crepes. Walk the other way and you’ll hit Lock Tien at the Dibuk junction, an indoor food court locals swear by for oh-aew, a shaved-ice dessert with banana and red bean, and Hokkien mee, the stir-fried yellow noodle dish that’s a Phuket signature.

The hotel is also a five-minute stroll from Dibuk Road, the Old Town’s most photogenic street and arguably its best for eating. The municipality has done it the great favour of burying the overhead cables that blight so much of Thailand, leaving the Sino-Portuguese shophouses to do what they do best: glow in the late afternoon light. Raya, at number 48, is an Old Town institution, set inside a beautifully preserved shophouse and known for its moo hong (slow braised pork belly) and yellow crab curry. The Charm Dining Gallery at 93 leans into the same vintage Phuket aesthetic with a menu of island favourites, whilst Royd at 95 offers a more contemporary take on Southern Thai cuisine.

We’re not totally myopic here at IDEAL, and food isn’t the only reason to wander. Soi Rommanee, a few minutes from the hotel, is the Old Town’s most photographed lane, its pastel shophouses now home to galleries and independent boutiques. The Sunday Walking Street Market runs along Thalang Road weekly, and the quarter’s street art, shrines and ceramic shops give you plenty of reason to keep your camera out between meals.

Hotel Verdigris is also a ten-minute walk from a trio of Old Town museums. Phuket Thai Hua on Krabi Road covers the Hokkien Chinese immigration story inside a beautifully restored Sino-Portuguese building. A few minutes on, the free-entry Museum Phuket occupies the former Chartered Bank and the old police station facing each other across the Phang Nga and Phuket Road intersection, with interactive displays on Phuket Baba culture. And further along Krabi Road, Baan Chinpracha is a privately owned mansion still occupied by the family, and a chance to step into a working Peranakan household.

Speaking of which…

Style & Character

Hotel Verdigris isn’t simply a place to stay but rather a setting for cultural immersion in Phuket’s Peranakan heritage, and the whole place has been built around that idea. The Old Town owes its look to the Hokkien Chinese tin merchants who made fortunes here in the 19th century, building the shophouses you’ll be photographing on Dibuk Road in a hybrid Sino-Portuguese vernacular you’ll find in only a handful of Southeast Asian port cities. Verdigris places itself squarely in that lineage.

The hotel’s specific inspiration is Martina Rozells, the Thai-Portuguese woman born in Phuket who became the wife of Colonel Francis Light, the British East India Company officer who governed Penang from 1786. The pair ran a trading post in Junk Ceylon, as Phuket was then known, and Martina’s story threads through every floor of the building.

Opened in 2022, it’s a family-run affair and the debut leadership project of Peach herself, who is of Peranakan Hokkien descent. On the day we visited it was Chinese New Year, and she had stopped by the hotel after coming from her grandmother’s house, still buzzing from the feast she’d just finished. For Peach, Martina Rozells’ background represents the true spirit of being Peranakan on Phuket Island: not just Chinese in Thailand, but something carrying influences from all over the world, including the West.

That layered identity shapes everything you see. The design mixes contemporary luxury with old Phuket character, and the verdigris pigment that gives the hotel its name (the bluish-green patina that forms on weathered copper, brass and bronze) is, in the owner’s words, unpredictable yet intriguing.

Both descriptions hold up. What makes it more remarkable is that none of this is inherited. Hotel Verdigris was built from an empty plot of land, the exterior designed to sit among the Old Town’s Sino-Portuguese shophouses as though it had always been there, the interior a contemporary interpretation of the Peranakan homes Peach grew up visiting. Inside, time loosens its grip. There’s nothing to tell you which decade you’re in, or which century for that matter.

The lobby sets the tone and establishes the materials you’ll follow through the building: patinating metals, dark ceilings, low light caught in faceted surfaces. The reception desk, fabricated by Phuket’s legendary Underwood workshop, anchors the space, finished with a custom pendant light that looks, intentionally or not, rather like a brass abacus stretched across the room.

Move further in and the palette deepens – the common areas are a study in Peranakan opulence, velvet and marble joining the metallic accents drawn from the same oxidising tones the hotel is named for. By the entrance to the Sunroom, a vintage Chinese curio cabinet holds the kind of famille rose porcelain Baba households across the Straits have been collecting for centuries, with framed antique maps and trade-route charts above nodding to Rozells’ story playing out a few hundred miles south of here. It is the stairs and corridors that impress most though; take a photo from any angle and it will look like something out of a design magazine, and you the professional who took it.

That sense of rootedness extends beyond the walls. Hotel Verdigris celebrates traditions across the year. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, Hokkien mooncakes and tea are served on the house all day in the Sunroom until 10pm, for in-house guests. When we visited on Chinese New Year, we were gifted a mandarin at check-in. Each season brings its own version of the same thoughtful gesture.

Most hotels are designed for tourists rather than locals. Peach has built one she would want to stay in herself. It’s adults-only, and there’s no sense of having to share the space with the kind of buffet-driven coach traffic that defines most island accommodation. What Verdigris offers, more than anything, is a sense of place: guests feel they’re staying in something of Phuket rather than a backdrop to it

Rooms

Fourteen rooms are spread across four floors, connected by a triangular staircase that zigzags past a koi pond before arriving at each landing. The design language holds throughout: herringbone parquet floors, brass-framed beds, metallic accents, and Peranakan flourishes everywhere you look. The rooms have a sultry, low-lit feel to them, more dusk than dawn in temperament.

We stayed in a Brass room, the entry tier and a comfortable size for couples. One caveat: if you’re a light sleeper, the walls between adjoining rooms are thin enough that we became better acquainted with our neighbours’ television preferences than we’d have liked. That said, those adjoining rooms are a genuine asset if you’re travelling as a small group or a family of grown-ups, connecting cleanly without compromising either side’s privacy.

Bronze rooms step things up in size, with terrazzo bathtubs and, in some, a small balcony overlooking the internal courtyard. The suites push further still, with more generous proportions and better positioning within the building.

The pick of the lot is the Junior Suite with private pool, which opens onto a top-floor terrace running the full length of the room. A long, narrow plunge pool tiled in dark green looks over the Old Town rooftops, and the whole space is shot through with a hush you don’t expect to find in the middle of a city. It’s the room to book if you’re celebrating something, or if you just want a private outdoor space that isn’t shared with the other guests.

Solo travellers are well looked after, too, with a purpose-designed Solo Traveller Room rather than the usual single-supplemented double. It’s a thoughtful touch in a category most hotels treat as an afterthought.

Throughout all rooms, the Peranakan-inflected aesthetic shows itself in hand-painted nightstands in the Baba style, and wood carvings by local artist Kriangrat Thephabutra running across doorframes and furniture. Paintings by Thavorn Merurat, arguably Phuket Old Town’s most respected painter, hang throughout the guestrooms, rendering the Peranakan architectural heritage with a reverie that avoids the merely decorative.

Bathrooms are beautifully done and stocked with high-end products from HARNN, the Thai natural apothecary brand. As with most properties in Thailand, resist the urge to flush toilet paper; a bin is provided. The loo itself is Japanese-style, which is a small pleasure in a tropical climate.

The minibar is complimentary, stocked with pods of the hotel’s own Verdigris Blend, a house coffee developed by Peach with local Phuket roaster Honest Coffee, alongside lemongrass, pandan and butterfly pea tea. There’s Netflix on the tele. Turndown is the kind of small touch that tells you the owner cares: a flask of jiao gu lan tea appears in the evening alongside Tao Sor, a Hokkien-style pastry filled with salted egg, salty and sweet at once. If you fall for them during your stay, head to Keng Tin on Phuket Road who’ve been making them to a century-old recipe.

Beside the tea, the night attendant leaves a handwritten note. On our stay it was from Tong, giving the next day’s sunrise time, the forecast temperature, and when the sun would set. Waking up the following morning was the best part of the whole room; light flooded in, the city was already at work outside, and the day felt entirely ours to use. Might have to revise that idea of dusk and dawn, you know…

You can also have breakfast in bed – you’ll find a little door hanger in your room where you just write your preferred breakfast time. Hang it outside of your door before 5am and breakfast will be delivered.

Facilities

This is a boutique, not a resort, and the facilities are sized accordingly, but what’s there is carefully chosen and well executed.

The marble-lined swimming pool sits at the heart of the building, overlooked by a reading room dotted with antiques, and is a rare hotel pool that’s actually calm enough to read beside. It isn’t a lap pool, but on a sticky Phuket afternoon it does exactly what you need it to. Staff appear with chilled water and towels the moment you sit down, and for much of our stay we had it entirely to ourselves.

The reading room doubles, after dark, as the hotel’s evening hangout. There’s no formal bar at Verdigris, which initially feels like an omission until you work out what’s actually going on: tables set with individual bottles of house single malt, reading glasses and a newspaper, guests writing down their own drams on an honesty system. A record player is on hand, and the deeper whisky list, including Japanese bottlings and limited editions, appears at the press of a button. It’s a far better answer than a hotel bar, and a far more interesting room to spend an evening in.

There’s no spa on site, which is deliberate; the hotel would rather send business to local practitioners than keep it in-house. A massage can be arranged in your room or out by the pool, which is rather more civilised than being driven somewhere across town anyway.

Beside the pool sits a reading pavilion overlooking the koi pond, framed by planting and shaded enough to be useable in the heat of the afternoon. Somewhere to take a book and a coffee that isn’t your room and isn’t the lobby, with the fish for company.

For getting around, the hotel runs a free shuttle that will drop you anywhere in the Old Town, useful in the midday heat even though you can walk to most of the good spots in under ten minutes. Complimentary bikes are on offer for anyone who prefers to explore under their own steam, and the 24-hour front desk is staffed by people who genuinely know the city. Concierge requests we made during our stay, from restaurant bookings to advice on day trips up the coast to a same-day laundry turnaround, were all handled with the same calm competence that defines the rest of the operation.

Food & Drink

Every city has a rhythm, and breakfast is where Phuket sets its tempo. It’s a city thrumming with great breakfasts, and its appetite for the most important meal of the day is second to none. It would feel a tragedy to waste it on a croissant that’s grown stale under yesterday’s heat lamp, then.

The mechanics are worth understanding, because they’re what makes the whole thing work. Rather than partner with a single restaurant or attempt to recreate shophouse cooking in its own kitchen (a fool’s errand given the generational recipes involved), the hotel has built relationships with a rotating cast of the Old Town’s best. You pick your set at check-in, the orders go out the next morning, and the food arrives hot, in the vessels it was cooked in, from kitchens that have been refining these dishes for decades.

Breakfast is served in the Sunroom, a gorgeous green-fronted glasshouse where morning light pours through floor-to-ceiling windows, catches the white linen tablecloths, and makes the whole space feel suspended outside of time. Which is fitting, because the food arriving at your table has been cooked to recipes handed down for generations, in kitchens that were here long before the hotel was, and will be here long after. It’s the right room for that kind of meal.

It’s also the kind of room that makes you slow down and order a second coffee, which is precisely what you should do, because breakfast is leisurely and the rest of the day can wait. Local coffee, of course, strong and properly made.

The set we ate ran like a greatest-hits compilation of Old Town breakfast cookery. Kanom Jeen Mae Jing arrived first: fermented rice noodles with Southern Thai curry sauces, the kind of breakfast that wakes you up properly. You get to choose two curries from fish, crab, peanut, chicken or fish entrails. We went with crab and peanut following the advice of Peach.

Then the Heng Heng southern signature set. Rice salad with boodoo sauce – about as iconic as it gets down south – alongside an earthy, brooding mushroom soup that could cure last night’s deepest, most entrenched woes, pillowy pork buns, and two boiled eggs for good measure.

And Kanom Jeeb Boon Rat, another Phuket stalwart, this time a dim sum specialist. You get four handmade dumplings; both pork and shrimp shumai, har gow, and pork and seaweed. There’s also a peppery, restorative congee and steamed taro cake. Just an incredible spread, whichever way you play it.

For guests who’d rather ease into Phuket gently, the Sunroom also turns out a Western breakfast made in-house – eggs cooked any way you like, toast, the usual cast – but you’re rather missing the point if you order it. The whole reason to be here is to eat the city.

The sets rotate with the seasons. During Kin Jay, the nine-day Taoist-rooted Vegetarian Festival held each October when many Thai-Chinese households go strictly vegan, Jay Fried Hokkien Noodle becomes the breakfast move, and the Eew Geng parade passes right in front of the hotel.

Whatever the time of year, every set arrives with an Ang Ku Kueh, the red turtle-shaped dessert of glutinous rice flour and sweet mung bean paste that sits on Baba praying tables during the Hungry Ghost Festival. Turtles, as Peach explains, are believed to travel between earth and heaven, carrying messages between the two realms, and embodying strength and longevity for the living as well as the departed. It’s a lot of meaning to pack into one sticky red sweet, and it’s delicious besides.

It’s the kind of breakfast that makes you understand why the owner started the hotel in the first place: she wanted guests to eat what she eats, and she’s removed every barrier to making that happen. Including, it would seem, price. This monumental breakfast offering comes at no extra cost, whichever tier of room you’re staying in.

Ideal For…

Small, design-led and rooted in Phuket’s Peranakan heritage, Hotel Verdigris fills a specific gap in the island’s hotel market: it’s for travellers who’d rather stay in a living city than at a beach resort.

Anyone who travels to eat. No other hotel in Phuket treats breakfast this seriously, and the Old Town location puts you within walking distance of more Michelin-listed cooking than most cities serve in a lifetime. If you keep a spreadsheet of Bib Gourmands, this is the hotel built for you.

Repeat Phuket visitors who’ve done the beach. If you’ve worked through Surin, Kamala and Patong on previous trips and want something different, the Old Town is the version of the island most first-timers miss. Verdigris is the best base for it.

Travellers who like to understand a place before they walk it. Martina Rozells’ story runs through the whole building, and the hotel works as a proper introduction to Phuket’s Sino-Portuguese heritage rather than treating it as backdrop. You leave knowing what you were looking at.

Solo travellers who’d rather not be treated like an afterthought. The purpose-designed Solo Traveller Room, the evening whisky setup, and staff who curate rather than hover make this a warmer place to stay alone than most.

It’s less suited to anyone after a beachfront resort. The Old Town is inland, and if you want sun loungers and a swim-up bar, Phuket has plenty that does that well. Families will also want to look elsewhere: this is an adults-only property.

Why Stay?

What Hotel Verdigris understands is that the best version of hospitality is sometimes knowing when to outsource. The rooms are beautiful, the design has genuine soul, and the Old Town location can’t be beaten.

But it’s the breakfast, sourced from the best shophouses within a ten-minute walk, that elevates this from a charming boutique to a destination in its own right. This hotel is going to be a regular stop during our visits back to the island. See you there?

Rates at Hotel Verdigris start with the Solo Traveller Room (21 sqm) at 6,900 baht (around £160) per night, while the Brass Room (24 sqm) runs from 8,500 baht (£195) for a twin to 8,800 baht (£200) for a king configuration. All rates include the hotel’s celebrated breakfast.

Address: 154 Yaowarad Rd, Tambon Talat Yai, Mueang Phuket District, Phuket

Website: hotelverdigris.com