The Opera Hotel and the Jungle Camp

The first time we walked into Capella Hanoi, we were somewhere else. Not Hanoi in 2024, not a five-star hotel, not any hotel really. We were in a 1920s opera house that had been converted into a rendezvous spot for singers and set designers and costumers, and the singers had just left the building. Their portraits were still on the walls. Their costumes were still in the corridors. There was a room called Diva's Lounge that felt like it belonged to a specific person who had lived a specific life, and the bar was a place she had actually stood at.

The hotel was designed by Bill Bensley. This is the name to know if you want to understand what makes certain hotels feel like more than hotels. Bensley is a Bangkok-based architect and designer who has spent forty years designing properties that are, essentially, immersive works of theatre. He does not design luxury interiors in the way most hotel designers do. He designs universes.

Capella Hanoi is one of them. Every one of the forty-seven rooms tells a different story from the opera world. There are over a thousand pieces of operatic memorabilia in the building. There are custom-painted portraits by an artist called Kate Spencer, one for every room. The restaurant is called Backstage and it feels like backstage. The signature spaces are not aspirational renderings of what a luxury lobby should look like. They are the specific lounges and dressing rooms of an opera company that never existed, made real enough to walk through.

We stayed there in May 2024 for the last few nights of a two-week Vietnam trip. It was the trip's recovery moment. We liked it enough that we started thinking, before we even left, about which Bensley property to go to next.

Two years later, we went to Capella Ubud, in the Keliki Valley north of Ubud. This is a completely different property from the Hanoi one. It is a jungle camp of twenty-two tented retreats built into a rainforest on the Wos River, without a single tree cut down in construction. The tents are connected by suspension bridges. Each one has a private saltwater plunge pool and a hammered copper bathtub. The theme is nineteenth-century European exploration of Bali, and each tent is designed after the professions of the original spice-trade adventurers: the Captain's tent, the Naturalist's tent, the Cartographer's, the Toy Maker's.

It is not a city hotel. It is not French Indochina glamour. It has almost nothing in common with the Hanoi property except that when you walk in, you are somewhere else. The commitment to the world-building is the same. The specific universe is different. This is what Bensley does. Every one of his properties is a fully realised imaginary place, and the guest is a temporary resident.

Capella Ubud also has a temple on the property, and one of the experiences the hotel offers is a purification ceremony conducted at the temple. We did it. It was not a hotel spa treatment dressed up in cultural language. It was a proper ceremony with an actual purpose, held at an actual temple, on the property because Bensley built the temple into the property because that is the register the property operates at.

The staff at both properties do things that generic luxury hotels do not do. They remember your name, obviously. They also remember what you asked about on the first day and follow up on the third. They arrange things you did not know were possible before you had thought to want them. This is not exceptional service in the standard hotel sense. It is the hotel treating you as a resident of the universe it has built for you.

We book Bensley properties now. There are others we have not stayed at yet, in Cambodia and Thailand and Sri Lanka, and we plan to. The best hotels are not five-star hotels. They are places you go and are somebody else for a few nights.

Book the Bensley property. Trust the world-building.