THE STANDARD, BANGKOK MAHANAKHON

Cleverly designed and lots of fun, this brand new city hotel breaks with the status quo but keeps the crisp hospitality intact. 

- Chris Schalkx

Don't get me wrong, I adore Bangkok's beige five-star hotels. There's comfort in the predictability of it a reassuring sense of being in gentle hands. Bangkok has perfected a frictionless high-end hospitality formula. Since the Yabu Pushelberg-designed Park Hyatt entered the scene in 2017, the Thai capital has welcomed big-brand hotels designed by heavyweights such as JeanMichel Gathy (the Four Seasons, and soon, Bangkok's first Aman) and André Fu (the Waldorf Astoria). They take their inspiration from the city's kaleidoscopic streets-the fruit, the flowers, the saffron swirl of a monk's robe-yet translate them into an inoffensive mélange of taupes, beiges and greys.

Hence, The Standard, Bangkok Mahanakhon, the new Asian flagship for the brand, feels delightfully jarring-a place of popping colours and bold silhouettes. It's on the 18 lowest and three highest floors of the King Power Mahanakhon, a twisting skyscraper in the central business district that looks as if a giant Pac-Man took a pixel-toothed chomp out of it. The hotel swaps the ubiquitous straight lines and chi-chi restaurants of its five-star peers for something more playful: a tearoom printed all over down to the gold-rimmed teacupsin monochrome modernist patterns; bathrooms with air-jet tubs big enough for four; and access to a glass-bottomed skywalk 980ft above the frenetic streets.