It has a whitewashed al fresco restaurant that specializes in Mediterranean fare, a night-lit swimming pool surrounded with beanbags, 23 air-conditioned beachfront bungalows with Balinese-style outdoor bathrooms and a two-bedroom villa with plunge pool set on a hill.

CNN: West Flores: So much more than Komodo dragons

Now at the Siam they house a restaurant, a cooking school and a villa complete with a private pool.

FORBES: A Lavish Hotel Project Unites Thailand's Sukosol Family

The lead characters are two proper middle-class English ladies, played by Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson, who, partly to get away from their husbands, pool their resources to rent an Italian villa called San Salvatore for a month.

NEWYORKER: Enchanted April

Serving as your personal port in the storm, this hotel and spa is modelled after an Italian villa with its courtyard lounge and fire pit, sculpture garden, outdoor pool and extensive grounds that have been cultivated with the scent and splendour of everything from roses to wisteria.

BBC: Daily deal: Sonoma wine country

The nearby pool house is a tall, pagoda-style structure modeled, in part, on the Katsura Imperial Villa in Japan, said Jeremy Fletcher, project manager for Dale Owen Overmyer Architects, which designed the compound.

WSJ: The $40 Million Party Pad

Simon Jackson, an Australian designer who made his name catering to expats and local tycoons, did the last renovation in 1993 when the kids were teenagers, changing what had been a Spanish-style villa with a Japanese garden into a neoclassical home, adding some ornate touches and the outdoor pool, but in a "California" palette of creams and yellows.

WSJ: Western Splendor in Hong Kong