Keemala Luxury Jungle Resort is an award-winning, uniquely designed luxury resort complex that utilizes its natural surroundings as an inspiration to create a totally different resort category for Thailand.
Located on a tropical jungle hillside and featuring 5 styles of accommodations: clay pool cottages, tent villas, tree pool houses, bird’s nest villas, and spa sanctuary villas, the accommodations and public spaces are designed around the site’s unique topographic surroundings.
The design focus is on the concepts of life and village and attempts to provide a simple and peaceful environment, with a touch of modern design. By taking advantage of the existing topography and the surrounding nature, the location is kept as much as possible in its natural tropical rainforest condition.
The resort’s layout is designed to be a “valley village” but one that provides privacy with an exceptional zoning arrangement for each unit. The interior design, in both the public and living areas, is focused on blending characteristics representing the concept’s relationships and unity. However, the full and exceptional functionality of each area is of primary concern.
In addition to the local tropical rainforest flora, non-jungle plantings are mostly of food plants such as fruits, vegetables, and local herbs growing in an organic natural scheme. The product of these manmade gardens is widely used in the hotel’s kitchen, especially the herbs of the chef’s garden located near the entrance of the complex. So are the denizens of the chicken and duck coops and the product of the salad planters and mushroom shed.
I don’t really know the purpose of the two water buffaloes that lounge near the waterfall, but they provided visual continuity to the resort’s “village farm” concept.
The suites are built in small groups of 2 to 4 units around the four basic design ideas. Each suite is created in 3 levels with only a single or two steps up or down from a central entry hall with the bedroom at a lower level and the indoor/outdoor bathroom at a higher level.
An exterior bubbling pool is outside every unit next to the entrance or around a verandah. Each suite has a private terrace. The suites are all air-conditioned and sport King or Hollywood twin beds, and the entire resort offers free Wi-Fi throughout the property.
My suite was in a Clay Pool Cottage complex. There were two suites sharing a walkway half a dozen steps down from the main road surrounding the resort and encircled by rainforest vegetation. There were electric golf carts that seemed to be continuously driven around the resort, so most times, we could hitch a ride on one of them. Of course, if you need to be at a specific place at a specific time, you can always call the reception to send a cart.
The communal areas that include the lobby, pool, two restaurants, conference space, and the spa were created to offer magnificent views of the lush forest surrounded by the sounds of nature. Throughout the resort, there were plenty of outdoor spaces with natural features, including the chef’s garden, waterfalls, and a rope bridge.
The cooking in the restaurants is classic Thai, with some dishes showing French, Indian, and Malay influences. Much of the vegetable components of each dish are sourced from the property’s gardens and salad planters.
Thai cuisine is highly aromatic and dominated by ingredients like lemongrass, kaffir lime, scallions, garlic, bird’s eye chilis, various mushrooms, fish sauce, oyster sauce, tamarind fruit, coriander, cardamom, and galangal – a member of the ginger family.
Jasmine rice is served with most of the dishes. There are 6 curry paste varieties in Thai cooking: red, yellow, green, sour, massamun, and panang. Coconut milk and coconut cream are used in very large quantities, as the soups and curries that comprise many of the classic dishes have coconut milk as a main ingredient.
The chef was kind enough to invite us to a Thai cooking class where we learned how to make a number of dishes, including Tom Kha Gai soup (my favorite Thai chicken soup), a large shrimp and chicken dish, a fish dish, and sticky rice with coconut cream as dessert. We then sat down and devoured the delicious results of our training.
And a great time was had by all!
The author received complimentary accommodations during this visit, but as always, we are dedicated to giving our readers an honest assessment of our experiences.
Manos Angelakis was one of the founders, the former Managing Editor for 25 years, the former Managing Editor Emeritus, and former Senior Food & Wine Writer of LuxuryWeb Magazine. He passed away in 2025 as an accomplished travel writer, photographer, and food and wine critic based in Hackensack, New Jersey. As a travel writer, he wrote extensively about numerous cities and countries. Manos was also certified as a Tuscan Wine Master and traveled to wine-producing areas in order to evaluate firsthand the product of top-rated vineyards. His articles in other publications include Vision Times and Epoch Times.
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