Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok at Chao Phraya River

Five years after the old Four Seasons on Rajadamri Road became an Anantara, the brand came back to Bangkok with a different idea of the city. The Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok at Chao Phraya River opened on 1 December 2020 on the water rather than in the shopping district, a sequence of low terraces and courtyards by Jean-Michel Gathy stepping down to the river in Bang Rak.

History

Four Seasons had run the Regent, later Four Seasons, on Rajadamri Road since the 1980s; that contract ended in 2015. The new hotel was built by Country Group, the developer led by Ben Taechaubol, on a riverside parcel assembled along Charoen Krung Road, with Capella Bangkok as its smaller neighbour on the same estate. The two opened two months apart in the autumn of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and the Four Seasons became the group's largest hotel in Thailand.

Architecture and design

Gathy, the Belgian architect behind Denniston in Kuala Lumpur, designed both the buildings and the interiors. Instead of a single tower he arranged the rooms in staggered blocks around a series of water courts, so that reflecting pools and planted terraces lead the eye from the lobby level down to the river. Vertical louvres in dark timber shade the façades. The site is one of the longest river frontages of any hotel in the city, about 200 metres along the Chao Phraya, and an art gallery, ArtSpace, sits within the grounds.

Rooms and suites

There are 299 rooms and suites, a large count for a riverside site, and the terracing gives most of them a view of the water or the courts. The larger suites have separate living rooms and outdoor terraces; the top category, the Chao Phraya Suite, occupies a corner of the upper floors with a direct river prospect. Interiors use dark timber, Thai textiles and screens in the manner of Gathy's resorts, and the corner terraces look along the river towards the Taksin Bridge.

Dining

Yu Ting Yuan, the Cantonese restaurant, holds a Michelin star in the Thailand guide. Riva del Fiume serves Italian food at the river's edge, Brasserie Palmier is the French bistro, and Café Madeleine is the pastry and coffee counter. BKK Social Club, the bar modelled on the hotel bars of 1920s Buenos Aires, has featured on the Asia's 50 Best Bars list.

Wellness

The spa has treatment rooms, a hydrotherapy circuit and a gym, and the main swimming pool runs along the riverfront below the restaurants.

Weddings and events

The ballroom and its adjoining meeting rooms make this the conference and banquet hotel of the shared estate, taking the large weddings and corporate programmes that the Capella does not. Outdoor receptions use the water courts and the riverside lawns, and the restaurants have private dining rooms for smaller dinners. Thai and Chinese wedding banquets and Western-style ceremonies are all held here.

Location

The hotel stands on Charoen Krung Road in Bang Rak, the district where the European trading houses built their godowns in the nineteenth century. Saphan Taksin BTS station and the Sathorn boat pier are the closest public transport, and the hotel's own boat crosses to IconSiam. The Charoen Krung creative district, with its galleries in old shophouses, begins just behind the hotel. Suvarnabhumi Airport is about 45 minutes by car. Among luxury hotels in Bangkok, it is the one that makes the river the whole subject of the design rather than a view from a high floor.