During our stay in Bangkok we changed hotels three times. Our first stop (part of the great value package we had booked in Hong Kong) was the S31, a four-star hotel with a great location right on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 31. It is housed in the iconic new “bird building” by Thai “surrealist” architect Sumet Jumsai, with a fibreglass “bird” perched on the top (and a smaller, similar sculpture by the hotel’s glass-walled pool.)
We decided to extend our stay, so when the package tour was up we had to move – and we moved in style. Hotel Muse is a new boutique hotel on the chic Chitlom street of Lang Suan. Its dimly lit lobby and sumptuous rooms are decorated in high Gothic Victorian (or in Thailand , Rama V, style). It reminded me of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula”, with its shadowy corridors, bowls of lillies and fake-old furniture and fittings (check out the bathroom!). I immediately responded with a blood nose.
Only the rooftop swimming pool departed from the theme. After all, its hard to make a tropical swimming pool Gothic.
After this, Daisuke had to go back to Hong Kong and I moved again, this time downgrading into the cheaper but fabulously kitsch Liberty Garden hotel in the Northern suburb of Saphan Kwai. This is of these places that I love that only seem to exist in Thailand, tatty retro hangovers from the 1960s . The Liberty Garden sank into obscurity a long time ago, and guests seem scant. But it must once have been a well-known establishment. It boasts a mini Statue of Liberty out the front, a hot pink ornamental arch over the driveway and an impressively large swimming pool surrounded now by the unused shells of the hotel’s back two wings, one semi-demolished and the other full of empty, echoing corridors like a tropical “Shining”.
The lobby, with its peeressly outdated Blue Diamond Coffee Shop, is the last word in retro tropical kitsch, beating even the Atlanta I think.
