Four Seasons
Resort The Nam Hai, Hoi An.

Yes, with eyes open: the architecture, the service and the Two MICHELIN Keys are real, and it has held Forbes Five-Star status for years running. Just know you are paying for a beachfront villa estate, not a walkable base for exploring Hoi An. If you want both, split your trip.

Not exactly hidden, with 50,000 Instagram followers and a wall of awards, but quieter than the Bali and Phuket names it competes with. Plenty of well-travelled people still do not have it on their radar. That gap is closing fast.

Garden Houses, Reimagined

Reda Amalou's villas borrow the logic of the nhà rường, the timber garden house of imperial Hue: a raised platform, a pitched roof of Vietnamese tiles, deep eaves throwing shade. Inside, one sculptural plinth gathers the bed, daybed and bathtub into a single move. The late Jaya Ibrahim did the original interiors, and HBA Singapore refreshed them in 2025, nudging the one-bedrooms to 87 square metres without erasing the founding idea.

Omakase Beside the Sea

NAYUU is the surprise: an intimate Japanese omakase counter, the kind of thing you do not expect on a Vietnamese beach, and it works. Beyond it, the kitchens run Vietnamese and international menus, and the Cooking Academy lets you spend a morning learning local dishes before you eat them. None of it feels like resort filler. The omakase seats are limited, so book the counter when you book the room.

Beach First, Hoi An Close

The resort sits on Ha My Beach in Dien Duong, a quiet ribbon of sand between Da Nang and Hoi An rather than inside either. That buys you calm and three pools stepping down to the water. The lantern-lit lanes of Hoi An's old town are a short drive south, while the My Son ruins and Da Nang's airport sit roughly forty minutes the other way. You are removed, but not stranded.

Fifty thousand people follow @fsnamhai for the same reason the place stays full: it photographs like a fever dream and delivers in person. The Nam Hai opened in 2006, the first hotel Paris architect Reda Amalou and his AW² studio ever built, and it reinterprets the timber-framed garden houses of central Vietnam, the nhà rường style from old Hue, as a hundred stand-alone pavilions on a 27-hectare stretch of beach.

Each villa centers on a single raised platform that holds the bed, the daybed and the bathtub, the lot. Pitched tile roofs, deep overhangs, gardens walled for privacy. Forty villas get their own plunge pool, and three infinity pools cascade toward the East Sea. A 2025 refresh by HBA Singapore widened the rooms without touching the bones. It is genuinely bookable online, but villas go fast in the dry season, so plan ahead.

Plan several months ahead for the dry season, roughly December through April, when the villas and the omakase counter both fill. Shoulder months loosen up, but the forty pool villas still go early.