Searching Saigon for Boutique Comfort

Justin Mott for The New York Times Downtown Ho Chi Minh City.

For more than 12 years now, I’ve been visiting Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and I’ve watched as it’s grown bigger and richer, faster and hipper, more cosmopolitan and more connected. Saigon, as it’s still known to most, has an anything-can-happen energy that embraces me the moment I step off the plane, and I feel more at home here than perhaps anywhere else in the world.

And yet after all these years, I have yet to claim a local hotel as my favorite — a refuge to offer relief and comfort. I’ve stayed in numerous mini-hotels, the skinny, multistory accommodations favored by backpackers (generally $5 to $25 a night). I’ve stayed in the grand hotels that date back to the French colonial era — the Majestic and the Continental (from about $150). I’ve stayed in the ultramodern Sheraton tower ($225 and up for a deluxe room).

But none of these places have seduced me with that magical combination of décor, service, convenience, location, character and price to make me ever really want to return. Simply put, in my experience, Saigon had no exceptional, reasonably priced hotels.

Matt Gross A room at the Ordinary Hotel.

During my most recent visit last week — to see friends and attend a wedding — I was more hopeful. A friend had told me about the Ordinary Hotel (25 Dong Du Street, ordinaryvn@yahoo.com), right in the middle of Saigon’s central downtown District 1. “Very boutique, very funky,” she wrote in an e-mail message. And affordable too: around $50 a night for a deluxe room.

Booking proved a challenge. The hotel’s Web site and e-mail address didn’t work, and neither, for a while, did its phones. I had to ask another friend to actually go to the hotel and reserve a room. When I got there, however, the desk clerk had no record of it. Luckily, a fourth-floor room was available. Unluckily, an elevator wasn’t.

Matt Gross Furniture in the A room at the Ordinary Hotel.

The room itself had a sheen of cool: it was spacious, with antique wooden furniture and a wide white divan under a broad bank of windows. The walls were a neat mix of magenta and pea-soup green. Wi-Fi signals flowed freely into my laptop.

But the sheen soon faded. The desk chair kept breaking. The paint on the walls was peeling. The Wi-Fi signal was strong, but the Internet connection spotty. The divan was dingy. The shower-head mount collapsed the instant I turned on the water.

Where, I wondered as I checked out after two nights, are Saigon’s true boutique hotels? The city is full of French colonial villas and Art Deco houses ripe for transformation into properties of character and class. And while real estate is expensive, labor remains cheap — and that should translate into bargains for travelers.

“As an investment, it doesn’t work,” said Jean-Marc Merlin, chairman of the Apple Tree Group, a Vietnam-based company that owns and operates hotels all over Southeast Asia. “The annoyance factor of having to complete a project is too high. If you have to turn gray over two years, you’d rather do it over 200 rooms.”

Matt GrossA room at the A & Em.

In the meantime, there’s A & Em (848-3-822-7245; www.a-emhotels.com), a chain of five small, design-savvy hotels. I checked into the newest location, at 150 Le Thanh Ton Street in the Ben Nghe Ward District, after leaving the Ordinary. Slick and clean, this month-old A & Em branch featured tasteful, minimalist interiors — flower patterns were everywhere, from the pillowcases to the frosted-glass walls of the bathroom — and, more importantly, a reasonable level of comfort. The linens were soft, the mattress was real. The TV was a Samsung flat-screen, not some boxy knockoff. The bathtub was huge and deep, with whirlpool jets.

There were, of course, a couple of design misfires, like a toilet-paper holder wedged inaccessibly between tank and wall and no mount for the shower head. But I was willing to let those issues go, especially since the desk had given me $5 off the $50 deluxe-room rate — a sweet gesture. Even better, a shower-head mount miraculously appeared above the bathtub one morning, without my having said a thing — just the sort of attention to detail that makes boutique hotels an attractive option.

Still, one incident disturbed me, albeit briefly: One morning, on my way to breakfast, I took the stairs instead of the elevator. Halfway down, I was suddenly grabbed by an employee and bundled into the elevator, just so I wouldn’t have to step around a platter of food that was on the stairway landing. Annoyance flared, then subsided: Saigon may be changing, but it’s still Saigon: rough, intimate, improvised and surprising — all qualities that make the city my home away from home.
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/searching-saigon-for-boutique-comfort/?ref=travel