Five apartments, not a hotel floor.
Urban Residences is five apartments beside the resort. You get the space and privacy of your own place. The pool, the restaurant and the people who run them are a few steps away.
Each is individually designed, modern with Khmer detail and locally made furniture, and has its own kitchen, living room and balcony. Somewhere to step out of the heat and the hustle of Angkor and close the door behind you.
Pteah. The Khmer word for home.
It is the word we chose for our logo, and the feeling we are after. Not a room you are checked into, but somewhere you come back to, cook in, and leave your things.
Where we came from
Urban Residences is part of Rambutan, which opened in Siem Reap in 2006, when there were almost no hotels here. Nine rooms down a sandy road, beside a pond where a thousand frogs sang every night, with buffalo wandering past.
A resort followed three years later, then Phnom Penh in 2013, and Urban Residences in 2016. Much has changed about the town. Not much has changed about how we run the place, and many of the people who started with us are still here.
The first gay-friendly hotel in Siem Reap.
We were the first, and at the time it was not an obvious thing to be. It mattered for the people staying, and just as much for the people working here: somewhere safe to have a job, whoever you are. The only thing we have ever hired for is openness and friendliness.
Twenty years on, that has not changed, and it is not a policy on a page. Couples, families, solo travellers, whoever you arrive with: you will be treated the same by the same team.
Rambutan is run as a social enterprise. Everyone who works here has access to the things that make it easier to build a life.
Education
Free schooling and scholarships for every member of the team.
Health & dental
Comprehensive cover for staff and for their families.
Support
Interest-free loans and childcare, so work fits around a life.
Service charge
All of it goes directly to the people who earned it.
Lighter on the place
Solar pre-heats the hot water. There are no single-use plastic bottles: refillable glass ones in the apartments, and free refill stations if you are heading out. Straws and packaging are biodegradable. The fruit and vegetables are organic, and either grown here or bought locally. Used cooking oil is recycled into biodiesel for the generator.
We support Clean the City and Grow a Tree, two local initiatives working on exactly that. None of it is complicated. It is simply how we would rather run the place.