Get something that’s suitable for the locale. To upmarket younger-gen Thais that includes spinning (above). The 200-member private club at the sensational futuristic KEMPINSKI BANGKOK SINDHORN is, well, sensational.
Interestingly the hotel was originally scheduled to be a 19-floor old persons’ residential block in the stunning new-build Sindhorn Village between Lumpini Park and Bangkok St Regis. Someone at the Royal Court, which developed and owns the village, realised that, with countless residence towers, beautiful gardens, a Harrods-type food hall, cafés, and boutiques to die for, it needed hotels. Enter a Kimpton and the 270-room Kempinski.
Kempinski Sindhorn has Kempinski-owned Resense wellness, a 25m outdoor-terrace (9th floor) salt-water pool and an excellent 24/7 LifeFitness centre with MyZone real-time assessment leading to significant prizes. Add the club that has hints of Hong Kong Rosewood’s Manor, but it is all wellness. 4,000sq m over 3 floors, 26 treatment rooms, studios for dance, large and busy spaces for pilates, spinning and yogas.
Ah yoga? Want injury rehab, slow movement lyengar, hot yoga, aerial, bodybalance with tai chi/pilates, ashtanga or power yoga muscle training, gentle flow breathing yoga (add mindfulness to this last one to give flow yoga), vinyasa moving meditation, inside flow with music meditation, energetic flow building strength yoga…. If you are exhausted, take a detox circuit or try aroma steam, salt sauna, tepidarium heated loungers, cold bucket or experience showers, near-freezing cold room, float therapy, vichy shower, hydro bath, dry float and thera wrap, alternating hot and cold Scottish shower, hammam, rasul mud-heat-steam, or balancer compression therapy. For the record one local works out twice a day here before regularly spending four hours after dark in Firefly Bar downstairs (live music and a 1,500-cigar humidor).
And actually the 270-room hotel is pretty sensational as well. All rooms have terraces (and corner suite 1123 was also memorable for its full-size refrigerator stocked with such goodies as Vegivore Kombucha and Fentimans Ros and Lemonade and Oriental Yuzu Tonic – and it was SO lovely to have a charging pad that held iPhone and watch simultaneously).
Look down the open atrium to the ninth floor pool. Look out of your room at greenery, be it just a hop, skip and a jump away, Lumpini Park, or, immediately below, Sindhorn Village gardens. These are so well laid out, and, beyond, is a single-level snake-shaped shopping arcade. Beauty stores, designer eyewear, whatever you need, with its Villa Market food hall in the basement. At ground level there are a multitude of cafés and restaurants.
Girlahead dined casual-global in the hotel’s just-opened top floor Bistro Le Mer, and breakfasted in the ground floor Flourish, which flows from lobby to inside-area to outside-area. Breakfast service was amazing, with dozens of young professionals nipping, zipping around, clearing and carrying (with occupancy currently at 90% there is a lot for them to do).
Day-long, high society locals sit, chat, take tea and meet friends in the lobby lounge, dominated by an open black and gold pagoda which contrasts magnificently with the bare concrete of the basic structure.
Actually the word ‘magnificent’ sums up this futuristic Kempinski.
