Anantara marks a quarter century rooted in Hoi An’s layered stories
As the hospitality collective celebrates 25 years, its General Manager reflects on what draws him to a Vietnamese city where history lives not in monuments alone, but in the daily cadence of its streets.
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Twenty five years into its journey, Anantara has learned that the most compelling destinations are those where the past doesn’t simply occupy display cases. Hoi An holds its history differently. The rhythms of everyday life here contain it: in the incense curling through narrow shophouses, in the patterns of footsteps across centuries old lantern lit streets, in the hands that still ferry goods along the Thu Bon River much as they did generations before.
Ross Sanders, the General Manager at Anantara Hoi An, carries this understanding with the ease of someone who has allowed a place to truly shape him. His reflections on the city speak not to tourism’s familiar metrics but to something more elusive: the specific gravity of a place that rewards attention. Hoi An demands slowness. It asks you to notice the lacquered doors, the silk merchants arranging their wares, the way light falls through shutters in the late afternoon. These details are not backdrop; they are the substance of living here.
The hotel itself, nestled within this layered landscape, acts as both sanctuary and gateway. Anantara’s presence in Hoi An reflects a philosophy that has defined its quarter century: to inhabit a place with respect rather than to impose upon it. The architectural vocabulary honours the city’s vernacular while offering the quiet sophistication its guests expect. Service carries that same calibration, attentive without intrusion.
What continues to draw Sanders, and by extension the collective, to Hoi An speaks to something deeper than novelty or aspiration. The city’s stories compound themselves. A visitor encounters not a single narrative but multiple generations of them, layered into the present moment. The Vietnamese merchants still negotiating with the descendants of traders who arrived centuries ago. The families who have occupied the same dwellings for lifetimes. The slow evolution of craft traditions that remain recognisably themselves while absorbing influences from each era of contact.
A quarter century of Anantara is, in many ways, a quarter century of learning to read such places with greater depth. The hospitality it extends grows from proximity to these rhythms rather than distance from them. Hoi An has taught this lesson clearly: luxury, at its truest, means being welcomed into the texture of a place rather than sheltered from it.
Imagery courtesy of Anantara Hotels (@anantara_hotels).
