A good way to spend the day is having a picnic on the neighboring island

 Song Saa Private Island: Stunning Barefoot Luxury In Cambodia

Forbes | 1 April 2014

It sounds like a movie plot:  sailing past a pair of untouched islands in a postcard worthy stretch in the Gulf of Thailand, finding out that they were for sale and buying them the next day, then building and designing an exquisite, casually elegant resort. But that’s the short version of what happened with Rory and Melita Hunter, an Australian couple who came to Cambodia in 2005 when Rory, an adman in Sydney, took a job with Bates in Phnom Penh.  While tooling around the islands in the Koh Rong archipelago in a fishing boat the following year, they came upon these islands, Koh Ouen and Koh Bong known as Song Saa, “the sweethearts” in Khmer. Rory had shifted careers by this point to fixing up and selling the French Colonial villas in the capital with Melita but even so, this real estate venture was a leap.

Part of Song Saa’s rustic room collection are overwater villas

The plan originally was to do a larger resort branded by one of the region’s big names, such as Aman or Six Senses but two crises intervened—the world financial meltdown and Melita’s bout with cancer,sending them back to Australia for treatment. While there, they decided to scale down the scope with Melita doing the design herself instead of handing it off to a famous designer based in Bangkok who has created the look of some of the region’s best known resorts. Looking at it now, it was absolutely the right choice because while handsomely designed, there’s a simplicity and intimacy that is totally in sync with the surroundings and might not have been in a larger scale, famous name version.  The 27 villas are rustic but ingeniously and artistically designed with castoff driftwood forming bedside tables, day beds and artwork, outside showers made of tree trunks, accent pieces of brass Moroccan lanterns and photos  commissioned from a Thai photographer celebrating aspects of the photogenic environment. Sybaritic touches come in the form of muslin draped fourposter beds, deep tubs facing the sea and outside, plunge pools with steps leading down to the sea, some in land based cottages, others in overwater bungalows.

The villa interior

The staff is largely drawn from the local village, Prek Svay, and while that may mean that some of the more cosmopolitan aspects of the room were a little foreign to them (neither the room service attendant who had deftly carried the collection of baskets containing my breakfast  or I could figure out how to use my espresso machine) and command of English isn’t always perfect, it’s balanced by extraordinary sweetness and desire to do a good job. Our waiter one night, after seating us at a table placed in the shallow end of a pool—meal locations sometimes are a surprise—and serving their version of the Cambodian classic  fish amok (a light, turmeric-laced curry) and the spicy fish soup samlor koko was eager to practice his English and in the process conveyed to us how proud he was that this resort was here.

Breakfast arrives for room service carried in baskets

The resort’s connection to Prek Svay is not just restricted to staff recruitment; part of their considerable philanthropic mission extends to working with the villagers on conservation efforts and providing support for their school—education being one of the many aspects of daily life that were gutted during the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s, extending into the late 1990’s. And the Hunters’ philanthropy doesn’t end there—they have a staff of naturalists working to preserve the marine environment, which is now a protected marine park that they created around  the coral reef that rings the islands.

The staff will take guests around to see their efforts or introduce them to the villagers of Prek Svay. But nobody will mind if guests opt for spa treatments instead, or a picnic on one of the beaches or to just hole up around the plunge pool and have baskets of Khmer specialties brought in.

To get there: The easiest is by helicopter, landing on the neighboring island of Koh Rong. Otherwise, you can fly to Sihanoukville or do the 3 ½ hour drive from Phnom Penh and then take their launch 45 minutes to the island.