Amanpuri — "place of peace" in Sanskrit — opened in 1988 as the first property of Aman Resorts and remains one of the most influential resort designs in Asia. The architect Ed Tuttle drew on Thai temple architecture, arranging a series of black-roofed pavilions on a terraced hillside above a private beach, each open to the breeze on three sides and oriented to frame the Andaman Sea. The result became a template imitated across the region for decades.
The resort sits at the northern end of Surin Beach and is not open to non-guests, but its visual influence on the hillside above is unmistakable. The design ethos — local materials, open-air pavilions, no lobby in the conventional sense — has filtered into countless hotels across Southeast Asia since. Aman Resorts now operates dozens of properties worldwide, but Amanpuri remains the original, and regulars still treat it as a benchmark for everything that came after.