10 minutes, and you've disappeared into the estate. A little over an hour ago you were in Singapore, flooded with notifications between the rush of cars, people, buildings, and buses.

A big city is incredible to build a career. And even a name.

But the same big city buzz that lets seemingly far-fetched dreams come alive so quickly can wear you down along the way.

Now, you step on teak floors, are surrounded by sea breeze, and welcomed by someone who already knows your name.

You are only an hour away, but here, you finally find your escape. And if you let it, your retreat.

This is the story of The Sanchaya, one of Southeast Asia's most decorated independent luxury estates.

In January 2022, it hosted a sitting Indonesian president and a Singaporean prime minister for one of the most consequential diplomatic meetings in the region in a generation. Condé Nast Traveler has named it among Asia's top resorts.

The Michelin Guide has awarded it two Michelin Keys, making it among the finest properties in Indonesia. And the woman who built it had never run a hotel in her life.

‍

🔍 The founder story

Natalya Pavchinskaya had never run a hotel.

She was a film producer and designer, the founder of Singapore-based production company S'YA Concept, with credits on Hotel Mumbai and Dev Patel's Monkey Man.

She moved to Singapore in 2006 and spent her weekends the way a lot of driven people like you do, looking for somewhere to breathe.

She found Bintan.

It was a largely undeveloped Indonesian island, only 50 minutes by ferry, and to her the beaches looked like the Maldives. The island was quiet and unhurried, so she kept going back.

In 2008, she found a secluded 9.6-hectare beachfront plot on Lagoi Bay, overlooking aquamarine water. Then she spent six years, with no hospitality background and no playbook, building a 29-room estate of villas and suites on an island many people had never heard of.

But how do you build something that feels like a home, not a hotel, when you have never built either?

‍

🌊 The feeling she was chasing

Russians have a word for what Natalya wanted to build. "Dacha." It's a second home where you can get some peace and quiet.

Dostoevsky had his in Staraya Russa, the town where he escaped St. Petersburg and wrote The Brothers Karamazov.

He gave Ivan Karamazov a line that said it better than any hotel brochure ever could: "I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky, that's all it is. It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach."

That was the feeling Natalya was chasing on those weekend ferry rides.

A place where people come together in what feels like the personal estate of a close friend. Where conversations are struck up with ease and guests become friends. Where minds can relax and be challenged.

‍

🏗️ Six years and no playbook

She had no hotel operations background and no institutional investors.

What she had was a very specific idea of what she wanted: that feeling of peace and stillness.

For three years before a single room was ready, she traveled across Southeast Asia with art suppliers from Thailand, personally selecting every artifact, antique, and furnishing that would fill the estate. It was everything from naval instruments to antique writing desks, some brass objects of obscure purpose that made beautiful decorations

Each piece was chosen to carry the feeling of an explorer returning home with the world in their luggage. The estate holds items from over ten countries, every object deliberate.

She partnered with Bangkok-based design firm P49 Design, whose portfolio includes the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives, the Sofitel Metropole Hanoi, and the Strand in Yangon, to translate the vision into architecture.

Together, they built a colonial great house designed to look, impossibly, as though it had stood since the 1920s.

And in December 2014, the estate opened.

And Natalya, a designer and filmmaker with zero hospitality training, suddenly had to run a hotel.

The Sanchaya had 30 suites and villas and, from early on, more than 150 staff, called Artisans. Then she made one foundational decision: she would not hire for experience. She would hire for soul.

Artisans are recruited for warmth that cannot be trained into someone who does not already carry it. Before every guest arrives, preferences are noted. By the time you walk through the door, the team already knows your name. By breakfast, they know how you take your coffee.

She learned hospitality operations the way most people learn to swim: in open water. She wanted five Artisans for every guest.

But a ratio on paper and a ratio at six in the morning, when three guests have different requests and the kitchen is fielding a catering logistics problem and the private immigration lounge needs staffing before the first ferry, are different things entirely.

Natalya launched with no marketing campaign, no press event, nothing. She made a conscious bet: let the estate speak, and trust the right people would listen.

Within months, they did.

‍

😰 The secret that couldn't stay secret

The growth was slow and deliberate. Natalya was not there to chase occupancy.

For the first years, The Sanchaya was Bintan's best-kept secret. But once you get The Sanchaya experience, you understand why it couldn't stay secret for long.

The retreat begins even before you arrive. At Singapore's Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal, a staff member finds you at the counter and presses two things into your hands: luggage tags, and a small pouch of ginger candies for the crossing.

In Bintan, a Sanchaya Artisan is waiting at the other end. Not in the general arrivals hall. At the edge of the crowd, looking for you specifically. They lift your bags and walk you into the estate's private lounge at the terminal, one of only two resorts on the island with one.

Inside, the music is soft enough to make you realise how loud everything else was. You sink into a couch. A wet towel arrives, then a drink of your choice, then a small plate of dried fruit. There is no check-in counter. Someone takes your passport gently and handles the rest.

You fill in a single form, you finish your drink and snacks, then a private car pulls up.

Ten minutes through Bintan later, you arrive.

You pull through the gates and into a grand entrance courtyard. White pergolas frame the approach on both sides, manicured hedges running the length of them, a fountain at the centre.

It is symmetrical in a way that feels less like landscaping and more like intention, every line pulling your eye toward the vastness of the property and the sea visible at the far end, with a beach dedicated for guests.

Greg Williams, the general manager, is there to welcome you.

You walk through the Great House and the estate opens up. The 50-metre infinity pool sits perfectly still, the white colonnades and palm trees reflected in it so cleanly it takes a moment to locate the waterline.

An Artisan walks the edge, unhurried, and the sea sits beyond.

This is the moment most guests describe. Not the room, not the dinner, not the sommelier. This.

The moment you walk into the lobby seeing the pool, the reflection, the open skies and spacious walkways, the quiet.

It's finding yourself stuck in time, realising you are somewhere built entirely around how it would make you feel. An hour from Singapore, yet you're completely elsewhere.

That experience repeated across thousands of guests. They arrived sceptical, with moderate expectations. I mean, this was Bintan, not Bali, not the Maldives.

That's the most incredible part of it all. For such an escape, you don't need a flight. The Sanchaya requires a ferry ticket and the willingness to stop.

In 2015, its first full year of operation, Condé Nast Traveler placed The Sanchaya on its Hot List of Best New Hotels in the World. Travel + Leisure put it on its IT List for Best New Hotels Around the Globe

By 2017 and 2018, Condé Nast Traveler's Readers' Choice Awards named it among the Top Resorts in Asia, two years running. The awards came from guests who could not stop talking.

‍

🏛️ What they kept coming back for

The Sanchaya is not a resort in the way Bintan's other properties are resorts. There is no daily activity programming, no poolside buzz, no sense that you are supposed to be anywhere or doing anything in particular.

The estate is yours, and so is the experience.

It runs on a completely different premise: that the highest form of hospitality is not service rendered, but the feeling of being genuinely known and genuinely free.

The gate guard has your name and photograph printed on a sheet of paper by the first morning after you check in. Even the Artisans carry the same sheet.

Guests find 30 elegantly appointed villas and suites, each built around a different Southeast Asian tradition: Thai, Balinese, Indonesian, colonial. Le Labo bath amenities, 464-thread-count Egyptian cotton linens, private wine cabinets, and Malongo espresso machines in every room.

The maxi-bar restocks daily without charge.

The menu and hotel amenities, listed, and bound in leather. Even the tea is custom, created in collaboration with German tea house Ronnefeldt exclusively for the estate.

The Sanchaya Suites sit on the upper floors of the Great House, balconies overlooking the infinity pool and the South China Sea, each with a separate living room and a Lefroy Brooks clawfoot bathtub.

Suites feel like manor house living, and the villas feel like a private tropical escape, whether that's a stay for one, two, or a group.

For those who want the estate entirely to themselves, the Vanda Villa, a palatial beachfront residence named after Singapore's national flower, the Vanda Miss Joaquim orchid, and inspired by the city's colonial black-and-white houses, has its own infinity pool, full dining facilities, and round-the-clock dedicated service for up to eight guests. Natalya herself stays here or in a Sanchaya Suite when she visits.

What's on offer, you may never fully use.

On the manicured lawns: croquet, archery, petanque. On the water: land-sailing and stand-up paddleboards. A Balinese-inspired spa, a beachside yoga pavilion, a well-equipped gymnasium, and a sommelier who has been ageing a Stilton in port for months. It is all there.

You could do none of it and probably will do a fraction of it, and that is entirely the point.

‍

🏚️ The Great House

You can treat the Great House like a lobby, or you can linger in it and its rooms.

The first thing you notice is not inside it. It is at the entrance: a 2.5-metre pearlescent pineapple sculpture by Malaysian-born, Singapore-based artist Kumari Nahappan, whose work also sits permanently at Changi Airport, the National Museum of Singapore, and ION Orchard.

She called it The Guardian Angel. In colonial Europe, the pineapple was the ultimate symbol of hospitality, displayed to honour guests. Natalya knew that. The choice was not accidental.

Inside, a colonial manor with library corners lined with Natalya's personal book collection, two leather chesterfields under a cage chandelier, and a sweeping black-and-white tape installation by Los Angeles-based visual artist Darel Carey, created during his residency here.

Her personal art collection runs throughout: rare pieces and antiques gathered across ten Southeast Asian countries over three years, each placed with intention.

Nahappan's 30 giant red fibreglass Saga Seeds are scattered across the grounds too, first shown at the Venice Biennale's ANIMA MUNDI International Arts Festival, now permanently installed here.

The saga seed is woven into Singapore's own cultural identity: resilience, love, the little red dot. On a Russian-owned Indonesian estate built for Singaporean guests, it lands differently than it would anywhere else.

The Decanter wine cellar sits off the library, its glass-fronted fridges stocked with an extensive collection. The Bar beyond it, dark chocolate chesterfields, wooden stools, curated spirits, antique artefacts from across Asia on every wall, is designed to feel like a gentlemen's club from the late 1800s. After dark, it does.

Sit in the Great House in the afternoon with tea. Look at the objects around you. The property only makes full sense when you slow down enough to notice what is inside it.

‍

🎨 A creative platform, not just a resort

Natalya built The Sanchaya as more than a place to sleep.

It has always been a platform: a gathering space where artists, musicians, film producers, and photographers come to work, perform, and spark ideas.

Darel Carey's permanent tape installation in the Library is one residency outcome. Internationally acclaimed violinist Igor Yuzefovich, then concertmaster of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, performed private salons for guests at the estate.

In 2018, Natalya hosted a film investment summit here, screening Dev Patel's directorial debut Home Shopper, a short film that had premiered at Sundance that year, with Patel and screenwriter John Collee of Hotel Mumbai both in attendance. The following morning, Collee sat down and wrote two entirely new film ideas.

Together, they later spent an entire month at The Sanchaya writing Monkey Man. The place had done it: the conversations, the quiet, the creative charge of the estate itself.

‍

🌍 The moment that confirmed everything

January 25, 2022. The South China Sea, flat and silver in the morning light.

At 11:40 local time, Indonesian President Joko Widodo stood in the lobby of this boutique beachfront estate and waited.

A car pulled up, and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stepped out with his Foreign Minister, his Defence Minister, and his Cabinet Secretary. The welcome was traditional, with tambourines and batik.

They had chosen The Sanchaya for the Singapore-Indonesia Leaders' Retreat. Not a grand hotel. Not a government facility. Not one of Singapore's gleaming five-star ballrooms.

This estate, 30 suites and villas, a beachfront, a Russian artist's dacha philosophy made real, was the venue for one of the most consequential diplomatic meetings in Southeast Asia in a generation.

The two leaders witnessed the signing of three landmark agreements covering defence cooperation, the extradition of fugitives, and the realignment of airspace boundaries, collectively known as the Expanded Framework.

Think about what it takes to get to that moment.

It started with a foreign woman on a weekend ferry, no hotel experience, a plot of land. Six years building something nobody asked for.

Opening with no marketing, then waiting. Hiring for soul, not skill. Betting that word of mouth would do what advertising never could. Growing slowly, reputation first.

And one day the most scrutinised, security-conscious, protocol-driven guests in the world chose her beachfront estate over every conventional option available to them.

‍

🏆  Here and now

Today, The Sanchaya holds two Michelin Keys, awarded alongside Amankila and Raffles Bali, among the finest properties in Indonesia.

The 2023 LUXE Global Awards recognised it as Best Luxury Romantic Beach Resort, Best Luxury Boutique Resort in Southern Asia, and Best Luxury Iconic Resort Globally. More than one in five guests returns.

And Natalya, who came to Bintan looking for a weekend escape, is still running the estate she built from a feeling she could not quite name, but could not quite stop chasing either.

Suites start above US$700 a night.

There is no loyalty programme, and there was never a noisy press release on a grand opening.

Natalya knew from the first weekend ferry ride who she was building this for. The people who, once they find it, can't quite explain why they had to come back.

They just did, and they still do. Just ask the one in five guests who return.

‍

Takeaway Scoop

Lessons that founders and operators can take from The Sanchaya story.

• Build from a feeling, not a market gap. Natalya did not spot an underserved segment in luxury hospitality. She had a feeling she wanted to recreate, and she built backwards from that. The dacha, the salon, the collector's home: these were not positioning strategies. They were personal convictions that happened to resonate at scale. The most durable businesses are often built this way.
• Hire for soul, not skill. Every luxury hotel hires experienced hoteliers. Natalya hired for warmth. The distinction sounds soft until you realise it is the reason guests keep coming back. Skills can be taught. The genuine desire to make someone feel at home cannot.
• Scarcity is a strategy. The Sanchaya has 30 suites and villas and has never expanded. That constraint is not a limitation. It is the product. Five Artisans per guest. A general manager who greets you personally. A gate guard who prints your photograph. None of this is possible at scale, which is precisely why it works.
• Word of mouth is a growth strategy, but only if the product earns it. Natalya ran no campaigns, had no PR launch, and spent nothing on distribution. What she had was a product so specific, so personal, and so difficult to replicate that guests did the work for her. A repeat guest rate of over 20% is not a metric. It is proof of concept.
• Build for the right audience, not everyone. The Sanchaya was not built for everyone, and Natalya never pretended otherwise. She built it for a very specific kind of person: someone who values stillness over stimulation, knowing over novelty, and taste over trend. That person exists in sufficient numbers to sustain a world-class estate. And when you build something that specific, the right people find it and never leave.