It may be your private lap pool in a tropical garden by the Andaman Sea. Or your ridiculously oversized bed in your ridiculously oversized villa. Or your round-the-clock personal butler who attends to your every whim, and even to those you didn’t know you had — like a bubble bath drawn with orchids and candles. But a stay at Phulay Bay will shatter pretty much everything you ever knew about Ritz-Carlton.

That, one suspects, is exactly what the company’s new brand — Ritz-Carlton Reserve — is aiming for. The first in a line of planned Reserve properties that also includes resorts in Vietnam and Costa Rica, Phulay Bay is a world away from the resolutely American, cookie-cutter comforts that some would say represent the old Ritz-Carlton. Still in its first year, the ultra-secluded resort in Krabi (think Phuket, 15 years ago), is now gearing up for its first full high-season (from November to April).

The property is all about the kind of quiet, personal — yet ultra-luxe — experience you’d expect at, say, an Aman resort. Upon arrival there are none of the crude mechanicals such as a reception desk. Instead, you’re ushered gingerly across stepping stones that lead over a pool to a pagoda-like pavilion. If it’s nighttime, hundreds of candles twinkle around you. You are welcomed and whisked away by golf cart to your villa, without a credit card leaving the pocket.

As a honeymoon hideaway, Phulay Bay would have to be considered among the best in southeast Asia. Each of the 54 villas has been designed for a seriously amorous time. Just take the indoor tub: it’s more like a bathing sanctuary, sculpted like a flower and big enough to fit four (though let’s not go there), and encompassed by four intricately painted panels (that, when you spin them around, double as mirrors), under a 25-foot sky-lit cupola. (That was only one of four bathing areas that came with my 1,141-foot Reserve Villa, including two rain showers and an outside bath, to boot.)

If you have it in you to venture beyond in-room indulgences, you can book a massage at the ESPA spa (one of only two in southeast Asia). For dining options you’ve got a poolside restaurant (oversized cabanas fringe a vast infinity pool overlooking the beach), with an international menu that to my tastes was superior to the resort’s more pedestrianized Thai restaurant. But the real culinary wow is the exquisitely presented breakfast pavilion, set up like a Willie Wonka experience of exotic fruit ensembles and local delicacies (shot glasses of fresh lemongrass juice and layered cups of finely diced dragon fruit and pineapple).

Central to the Reserve brand’s guiding ethos, location (and its sense of place) is everything: a one-hour-twenty-minute flight from Bangkok, Krabi remains — for now at least — a chilled-out southern Thai beach retreat with plenty of gobsmackingly gorgeous topography (read: limestone cliffs towering over white sand beaches), and plenty to do (I pulled myself away for a half-day of kayaking through nearby mangroves). But as much as the resort likes to play up the local experience, you’d be crazy to venture too far from Phulay Bay.