Private villas, nature walks and slow luxury: Mandarin Oriental Desaru Coast finds its third life

Private villas, nature walks and slow luxury: Mandarin Oriental Desaru Coast finds its third life A former One&Only resort begins a new chapter as Mandarin Oriental Desaru Coast, offering private villas, sea views and a quiet tropical escape just two hours away from Singapore. Here’s a millennial fairy tale, children. Once upon a time, there was a hotel on the southeastern tip of Johor that couldn't quite make up its mind about itself. Launched on the cusp of the pandemic as a One&Only, it opened into a world that had stopped travelling. Post-pandemic, it found itself reborn in mid-2025 as The Sireya – a transitional name that it wore for the better part of a year before becoming, on Jan 30, something else again: Mandarin Oriental Desaru Coast, the group's first resort in Southeast Asia. Third time lucky, then. And this particular third life suits this 128-acre property rather well. Getting here from Singapore is half the adventure. You can come by road – a two-hour transfer in the hotel’s car through Tuas or Woodlands, depending on what day it is and which traffic gods you've managed to offend – or hop on a ferry from Tanah Merah, which runs Thursday to Sunday and deposits you on the Johor shore 90 minutes later. Either way, the approach through Johor’s palm oil plantations is unexpectedly restorative: after the manicured rigidity and towers of Singapore, the landscape grows greener, lower, less urgent. At one end of Desaru’s coastal strip, the Westin, Hard Rock and Anantara cluster together companionably like Cinderella’s sisters. The Mandarin Oriental sits apart at the other end, which tells you something about the kind of guest it's after. The late Kerry Hill designed the original buildings, and while MO has fairly extensive renovations planned through 2028, the architectural bones remain his – and they're very good bones. Hill made his name creating sleek tropical modernist resorts, and this is among his last completed works before his death in 2018, sharing a quiet family resemblance with his Datai in Langkawi and Amanwella in Sri Lanka. What he understood, better than almost anyone, was that buildings in the tropics should feel less like shelter against the landscape and more like a delicate dance with it. At Desaru, that means 44 low-slung white rectilinear volumes arranged as a sequence of salas: bathroom pavilion separated from the bedroom pavilion by an open-air courtyard, plunge pool, and a deep-shaded loggia with a capacious daybed wide enough to fit a family of four. Each villa is oriented eastwards to catch sea breezes and morning light, with the loggia looking out to jungle or ocean, depending on where you land in the property: rainforest suites to the north, ocean-facing rooms in the middle, and the ocean front suites closest to the water, with a freestanding four-bedroom villa anchoring the southern end near Ember Beach Club, the latter currently under renovation till September. The whole place has, in the best possible way, a slightly 1950s resort energy that’s unhurried, generous, and slightly dreamy. The sense of being immersed in nature is real, though. At the centre of the sprawling spa rises an enormous 300-year-old banyan tree which has the effect of making whatever treatment you're receiving feel faintly mythological. The 56m green-tiled lap pool stretches towards the ocean and ends for the last 10m under a thick jungle canopy making for an extraordinary swimming experience. The Bermuda grass lawns are springy and thick underfoot, the kind you want to remove your shoes for immediately. The photographer Slim Aarons would have had a field day here. White modernist buildings. Ladies going golden at the water's edge, children ambushing the staff on the lawn with demands to come play soccer, which they promptly and cheerfully accommodate. Beyond the tree line, the beach stretches long and largely private, though the sea is one of those seas that photographs beautifully – particularly at sunrise, when it catches the early light in copper and pewter – but rewards the geologically curious more than the keen swimmer. The shoreline is studded with sharpish-pebbles and ancient mudflats transformed by heat and pressure over some 300 million years into metamorphic rock, which is a remarkable fact and also a practical reason to wear sandals. In other words, if you want to paddle, do it in the pool. Morning nature walks, led twice daily by a resident marine biologist and geologist, begin before the heat sets in. Long-tailed macaques and dusky leaf monkeys arc through the canopy. Oriental hornbills appear without warning, their lopsided silhouettes flitting overhead. White gibbons have been spotted and, occasionally, small elephants wander in from a nearby reserve, having apparently weighed the amenities offering and decided MO was worth the detour. The activity programme runs seven days a week and is, pleasingly, entirely complimentary. Batik painting on Fridays. Padel and terrarium workshop on Sundays; on other days, dong stick workouts, archery, a storytelling session called 'Malaysia's Lost Tale', a cocktail masterclass staged at the Dusky Monkey bar. Beyond the resort's gates lies little in the way of local sightseeing, unless a Hard Rock hotel carries nostalgic weight. This is not, on balance, a problem, especially since the dining situation is, like the resort, easy and pleasing. The kitchen sends out food with considerable range. At Ambara, the all-day restaurant, a pomelo kerabu comes scattered with ginger torch and betel leaf; the catch of the day arrives with charred baby romaine and a lime butter sauce; the leng chee kang, that cooling Cantonese institution, appears on the dessert menu alongside a durian cheesecake with kaya ganache that is either an act of provocation or high patriotism, possibly both. Elsewhere on the menu, a saffron risotto with seared scallops swings with a Sarawak black pepper wagyu rib-eye. At night, you fall asleep to the South China Sea moving against those ancient rocks. In the morning, the monkeys are up before you. And by the time you've looked at your diary and started scheming how you can plausibly extend your stay, the resort has done its job. A fairytale happy ending with three lives, all things considered, well spent. www.mandarinoriental.com. Rates from MYR3,100 (US$764; S$982) per night. The resort can arrange for transfers to and fro Singapore, from MYR1,800.