The moment I got off the ferry, I handed my passport to someone I’d met four minutes earlier, then sat in a private lounge while other people cleared Indonesian immigration on my behalf. Ten minutes later I was through the gates. That was the tempo for the entire weekend.
DANAMIC was hosted at The Sanchaya from 30 August to 1 September 2026, two nights on the Bintan estate that holds Two MICHELIN Keys. Here’s the honest version for anyone in their twenties or thirties working out whether to save up for it.
50 Minutes and a Borrowed Passport
The ferries leave Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal, 10 minutes from Changi Airport, and dock at Bandar Bentan Telani (BBT) on Bintan’s resort strip. We rode Emerald Class, the premium cabin, and the Sanchaya staff had us from the second we landed.
The estate keeps its own lounge inside BBT with express clearance, and return transfers come with the stay. I’d never let anyone walk off with my passport before, and sitting there while the paperwork solved itself felt faintly unreal.
The Sanchaya’s General Manager Greg Williams says his regulars go further. “We have guests that have stayed with us numerous times that won’t even wait for their passport,” he told me. “They’ll trust our team to pick their passports up and they’ll hop straight in the car and be sitting by the pool within 10 minutes.”
The Great House lit up after dark, home to The Dining Room, the library and the upper-floor suites
White Lotus, Minus the Plot
A private bus covered the last 10 minutes to paradise. Greg was at the door with Director of Sales & Marketing Ricky Yu, Sales & Marketing Manager Siti Kotijah (better known as Siko), and what felt like half the estate.
My first glance at the estate and already my brain cued up the opening theme of HBO’s The White Lotus. Spotless black and white colonial buildings, dead symmetrical, minus the ever-changing murder-mystery (thankfully). Walk straight through the entrance and the view arrives in order: the 50-metre infinity pool, the private beach, then the boundless sea.
Sanchaya means collection in Sanskrit, and the place was built as one. Founder Natalya Pavchinskaya, a Singapore-based designer and film producer, spent years gathering Southeast Asian antiques and art before Bangkok firm P49 Deesign put a 1920s-style great house around them.
The buildings carry the colonial look without the musty old-house feel. Work by newer artists shares corners with the antiques, and somehow none of it jars.
A stone owl on its plinth, one of the Southeast Asian pieces scattered through the rooms for guests to find
I assumed 29 villas and suites on a compact plot meant I’d see everything by lunch on day one. Wrong. The layout keeps opening into somewhere I hadn’t been, yet a couple of turns always put me back somewhere familiar.
Greg’s line for it: “It’s like staying in a rich uncle’s country residence.” That uncle is at his most generous in The Salon & Library, where guests are told to open the cabinets, pull out a book and sprawl on the sofas.
A Suite Bigger Than My HDB
My suite was larger than my three-room flat back home, the Housing & Development Board (HDB) public housing most of us grow up in. And trust, I’m not stretching for effect.
Everything inside agreed with everything else: Le Labo products in the bathroom, 464-thread-count Egyptian cotton on the bed, a pillow menu, a Malongo espresso machine and a complimentary maxi-bar of drinks and snacks. Even the water is bottled on site, which the estate says keeps up to 80,000 plastic bottles a year out of circulation.
A suite’s living area, dark wood and cream seating facing full-height windows onto the gardens
The privacy surprised me most. Villas and suites sit close together, yet every balcony faces greenery rather than a neighbour’s room. Nobody caught me asleep on a couch in an unglamorous position, and I stopped expecting them to.
If the rates make you wince, step inside one of these rooms and you’ll see exactly where the money went.
One of their headline Villas, the Vanda Villa, takes it further: 1,426 sqm, sleeps eight, its own pool, two connected floors, a separate building with another bedroom, and a kitchen you could cater from. Greg calls it a “little estate within an estate”, with the cherry on top being it takes its name from our very own national flower, the Vanda Miss Joaquim.
Smaller options start at the 60 sqm Junior Suite and climb through the 118 sqm Sanchaya Suite, while the Leelawadee compound sets three one-bedroom villas around a 17-metre pool and sleeps six.
Big Plates, No Tiny Portions
Here at the Sanchaya, they don’t open with a menu. They ask you what you feel like eating. That alone tells you which tier of resort you’re standing in.
Egyptian cotton, a pillow menu and shuttered windows, with housekeeping passing through twice a day
The Dining Room in the Great House runs à la carte from 7am to 10pm with no allocated mealtimes, and Tasanee Grill cooks Bangkok street food beside the pool from 6pm to 10pm. Fine dining here never meant just three peas on a wide plate, and every meal left me bloated and unrepentant.
The estate doesn’t lean hard on Bintan, except on the plate. Local gong gong sea snails come with mango salsa, a wild mushroom rendang anchors the plant-based menu, and Greg says the chefs will even cook the plain noodles your mum used to make if you ask. Safer palates still get pizza.
Book the Kong Ming Dinner on the Beach for one night. Chef Sandi runs it, with a wine tasting, lobster grilled over open fire, a rib eye, and the sunset doing the lighting. You won’t want more, purely because there’s no room left.
Dessert is where the kitchen experiments. The Janice Wong collaboration announced on 26 August 2026 brought the Singapore pastry chef’s sugar-free REI range onto the menu, and it makes the final course feel marginally less sinful.
Vanda Villa’s white pavilions wrap a private pool and terracotta deck, with 1,426 sqm for eight guests
For People Who Can’t Sit Still
If lounging on a beach doesn’t count as an activity for you, they have a list for you. Cocktail-making for adults, wine tastings with the sommelier in The Decanter (a glass-walled cellar with an ocean view), and cooking classes where the family eats whatever they manage to concoct. If dinner is inedible, the chef isn’t the one to blame.
Outdoors there’s archery and croquet on the lawn, pétanque, stand-up paddleboards, Blokart, house bicycles and beach kite flying. The padel courts open 10am to 7pm and sit among only a handful in Indonesia. A 24-hour gym waits for anyone feeling guilty about the rib eye, while the spa handles nails and foot massages.
For short stays, Greg points at what’s close: nine holes of golf 10 minutes out, cycling around a lake five minutes away. Plenty of guests bin those plans. They arrive with ambitions, then “the estate wraps them in a cocoon of relaxation”.
The Collection boutique (10am to 8pm) sells silk, jewellery and handicrafts made for the estate. Mr Morris, the resident mascot, lends his name to a foundation funding education and scholarships, an orphanage, a home for the elderly, and environmental work.
Sticky date from the dessert list, the course where The Sanchaya’s kitchen takes the most risks
The Artisans Are the Point
On day one I lost track of my suite, and it clearly showed on my lost face. A staff member I’d never met, mid-walk with other guests to the spa, called out, “Mr Luke, your suite is over there!” I hadn’t said a word.
The Sanchaya calls its staff artisans, and Greg says they’re the whole thing. “Without the heartbeat of the estate, which is the people, it could just be another hotel.” He credits training and retention: “A lot of the staff have been here since day one.”
He also calls the staff-to-guest ratio “extremely high in comparison to a lot of hotels”. Artisans can say yes on the spot without checking with a manager, and some Singapore regulars are close to 30 visits.
I asked for one word to describe the Sanchaya, and this stalled Greg for a moment. “No one’s ever asked me that before.” He steers away from ‘luxury’, a word he thinks is “thrown by so many different companies”. When I offered ‘comfort’ instead, he said, “Right, nail on the head there.” And I think this summarises everything you’d experience in a stay in the Sanchaya. From the outside, this looks like the high life, whilst on the inside, every decision is about how comfortable you feel.
A freestanding Lefroy Brooks tub behind plantation shutters, standard issue across the villas and suites
The Keys, and the Caveats
The Two MICHELIN Keys came from Indonesia’s first MICHELIN Keys list in 2025, landing The Sanchaya in the “exceptional stay” tier with Amankila, Raffles Bali, Four Seasons Hotel Jakarta and The Langham Jakarta. It’s the only Two Key address on Bintan, it joined The Leading Hotels of the World in July 2026, and it had already taken a Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice spot among Asia’s top resorts in 2017 and 2018.
Greg compares the Keys to picking a Singapore restaurant for its MICHELIN star. “It’s something that can’t be bought,” he said. “We didn’t even know we were on the list until we got a very pleasant email to say congratulations.”
Two things to know before you book. The beach is public, there are no lifeguards on the sand or at the pool, and the estate flags occasional strong currents and suggests protective footwear. Nothing is walkable past the gate either, so every meal is a resort meal, billed in Indonesian rupiah (IDR).
Our stay was hosted, so the rates below come from published listings rather than my own bill.
A covered pavilion near the sand, cream cushions and dark wood chairs aimed through the palms at the sea
Who Should Book This
Personally, if I had to give it a score it would be 9.0 out of 10, and the price is the only thing standing between The Sanchaya and a perfect ten. Nothing went wrong across two nights, and everything landed a tier above what I expected.
Money will always weigh on those of us in our twenties saving to spoil ourselves, and this sits at the expensive end of any trip you could plan. Every dollar goes somewhere you can see, though, and it’s the most decadent reset I’ve found an hour from home.
It suits couples who want real distance without burning leave on flights, and families who split a villa get the most out of it. Go all in: upgrade to Emerald Class, take a cooking or cocktail class, and from one drinker to another, don’t skip the free-flow Sunset Hour cocktails while the sky turns orange over the water.
Plan Your Two Nights
🗓️ Date: Our hosted stay ran 30 August to 1 September 2026
⏰ Time: Check-in 3pm, check-out 12 noon
📍 Location: Jalan Gurindam Duabelas, Plot 5, Sebong Lagoi, Tlk. Sebong, Kabupaten Bintan, Kepulauan Riau 29155
⛴️ Getting there: Bintan Resort Ferries from Tanah Merah to BBT, then a 10-minute estate transfer. 2026 guides list Economy from S$62 one way and S$100 return (S$110 on peak dates), with Emerald from about S$89 one way. Check in 90 minutes before departure
🛏️ Rooms: 29 villas and suites plus a private residence, from the 60 sqm Junior Suite to the 1,426 sqm Vanda Villa
💰 Rates: Listings put entry-level suites at about US$412 to US$642 (roughly S$560 to S$875) a night, with villas from above US$700 to over US$2,000, before tax and service
🍽️ Dining: The Dining Room, 7am to 10pm; Tasanee Grill, 6pm to 10pm. Soto Medan runs IDR 165,000 and the Australian wagyu tenderloin IDR 1,275,000, plus 21% service charge and government tax
🎾 Facilities: 50-metre infinity pool, spa, 24-hour gym, padel courts, library, wine cellar and The Collection boutique
📞 Reservations: reservations@thesanchaya.com or +62 770 69 2200
Remember that the word here is ‘comfort’, and begins at the ferry terminal rather than the front door. If a two-night reset belongs on your 2027 list, check dates and villa availability at thesanchaya.com, lock in the ferry, then let the artisans take it from there, passport included.
Photos by Luke Anthony Paglar of the DANAMIC Team; additional visuals courtesy of The Sanchaya.
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