The Mandarin Oriental Authors’ Lounge

Tonight, the 10th of January 2023, is the last night we’ll be in Bangkok on this trip as we fly to Auckland, via Sydney, tomorrow afternoon. We decided to have dinner at The Verandah, which is the Mandarin Oriental’s coffee shop. The Mandarin Oriental Bangkok is a very beautiful and elegant hotel, one of SE Asia’s great hotels, and it has an interesting history. The lobby of the hotel is very elaborate and lavish in its decor.

We did have a very nice dinner at The Verandah but the main purpose for going to the Mandarin Oriental was to revisit the stunning set of rooms that make up the Authors’ Lounge which is particularly renowned for its scrumptious traditional afternoon tea of delicate finger sandwiches, freshly-baked scones, home-made jams, cakes and pastries.

The Authors’ Lounge is located on the ground floor of the original Oriental Hotel, which was built in the 1870’s and still retains a look of the early 1900s, with its elegant white wicker furniture and hand-painted fabrics. It is named for the many famous writers who have stayed at the hotel since the late nineteenth century, most notably Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Noel Coward and Graham Greene. There are precious old black-and-white framed photographs of many of those authors on the walls of the lounge, many of them signed by the authors. There are also old photographs of Thailand and the Thai royal family from the 19th century.

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.” – Somerset Maugham The Painted Veil 1925

“Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.” -W. Somerset Maugham

After having a wander around these gorgeous (by then closed) rooms, we got the hotel’s shuttle boat back to the Shangri-la. It was a very short but delightful little ride on the River of Kings. A very nice ending to a lovely evening on our last night in Bangkok.