HARNN Heritage Spa opens at Intercontinental Phu Quoc Long Beach Resort, Vietnam

Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia​ has a love affair with bamboo. Known for championing it as the "steel of the 21st century", the Ho Chi Minh-based innovator has brought the material's unique qualities of strength, flexibility and warm beauty to projects around Asia and beyond, creating graceful arching domes and vaulted halls (as well as some straight edges) across hospitality, business and domestic structures.

Nghia's firm was employed to created the spa at the high-end Intercontinental Phu Quoc Long Beach Resort, which opened in the second half of last year. It needed to be spectacular – the wellness facility is a branch of the HARNN Heritage Spa chain, a Thai outfit that won global spa of the year at the World Luxury Spa Awards in 2017, among many international titles.

The brief was to create a luxury retreat, inspired by locale and local healing practices.

Surrounding a lagoon, in a secluded corner of the resort replete with lush indigenous plantings, lotus, large mangroves and the chirruping critters these attract, the spa comprises a main reception area and a series of separate treatment villas in the form of bamboo shells that seem to hover above the water and which are connected by a floating bridge to their rear.

The emphasis within is restful simplicity, where treatments on offer lend from the healing traditions of Vietnam, Thailand, Ayurveda, aromatherapy, and more traditional medicines.

The most apt? The bamboo massage, designed to ease physical tension and sore muscles with a rolling bamboo stick, or perhaps the bamboo body brushing, which exfoliates and promotes healthy blood and lymphatic circulation.

Nghia also designed the resort's LAVA restaurant, and Bangkok-based Australian Ashley Sutton was behind the bar, INK 360.

Resort classic rooms from $238. See phuquoc.intercontinental.com