There’s a moment, stepping off the elevator at lebua Bangkok, when the building stops being a hotel and becomes an altitude. The golden dome sits on top of State Tower, the river bends below it, and twenty years after it opened, the world’s first vertical destination is rebuilding the rooms that made it famous.
The next phase premieres this winter, timed for the festive season and New Year’s Eve. Sirocco gets a full redesign, Café Mozu becomes Les Marchands, wellness moves into the menus and the suites, and the suite redesign that started with the Tower Club Signature Collection keeps rolling across the tower.
I’ve never understood why more hotels don’t build upward like this. One tower, eleven places to eat and drink, and an elevator ride replaces the taxi ride between them.
Sirocco keeps the view and changes the room
Sirocco by lebua has always sold the same beautiful fact: dinner outside, 64 floors up, with the Chao Phraya River and the whole lit sprawl of Bangkok below. It’s the world’s highest al fresco Mediterranean restaurant, and the redesign protects the view while rebuilding everything around it, with expanded seating and lounge areas, an enlarged bar, and raised flooring within the fountain section.
The palette calms down to crisp whites and natural tones, with sculptural columns, softer lighting, and curated landscaping worked through the terrace. It sounds like a small shift until you picture the old room’s drama traded for something quieter and more confident.
The view was never the problem. The room just had to catch up with it.
Sirocco was one of the region’s first rooftop restaurants, and it has carried that first-mover fame for two decades without sitting still. A redesign at year twenty is a statement all by itself: the icon intends to stay one.
Les Marchands takes over the all-day hours
Downstairs, the change is total. Café Mozu, the all-day room generations of guests have started their mornings in, is being reimagined as Les Marchands, with menus that travel across Indian, Italian, and authentic Thai cooking in a single open-air room finished in the same warm, gentle tones as the renovated suites.
The part I like most is the poolside piece of it: private cabanas, a proper day club rhythm, and the spa, salon, and fitness center folded into the same stretch of the property. Locals and non-guests can book in for dining and treatments too, which gives the place a neighborhood life most hotel restaurants never get.
All-day dining is the hardest room in any hotel to get right, because it has to be breakfast, a working lunch, and a slow afternoon in the same chairs. The regional spread is the practical answer.
Wellness moves into the menus and the suites
The wellness layer goes deeper than a spa menu refresh. Les Marchands and the in-suite dining service both gain nutrition-led options built on frameworks developed by nutrition experts, organized around revitalization, energy, probiotics, and functional eating, with tailoring for different age groups and needs.
Science-based meditation and sleep support services follow in stages through 2027, and the suite redesign continues floor by floor. The rollout is staged rather than rushed, layered onto a spa and salon guests already use. The recently debuted Tower Club Signature Collection, 28 accommodations on the 55th floor, shows the direction: lighter, calmer, and built around rest.
Hotels usually bolt wellness onto a stay as an extra you book. Folding it into the food and the sleep itself is a different idea, and it fits a tower where the spa, the pool, and dinner already share the same few floors.
New Year’s Eve is the deadline everything points at
All of it lands in time for the hotel’s biggest night. lebua is the only hotel in Thailand home to two two-Michelin-starred restaurants, Mezzaluna and Chef’s Table among its 11 restaurants and bars, and every venue hosts its own New Year’s Eve event this year, from a seven-course tasting menu to Bollinger at Flute, the world’s highest Champagne bar, to a riverside celebration with live music.
Eleven venues, one midnight.
At midnight every room turns to the same show, fireworks over the Chao Phraya and the skyline. As President and CEO Narawadee Bualert puts it, “true luxury is not simply what we offer but is how we make every guest feel.”
Reservations for the New Year’s Eve program are limited, and the hotel is steering guests to book through lebua.com. The New Year’s Eve page at lebua.com carries the menus and the booking links for each venue. If the winter premiere follows the pattern of past seasons up there, the Sirocco rail seats will go first.
The awards shelf says the formula already works: number 5 in Thailand in the Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards 2026, with Travel + Leisure World’s Best honors and a La Liste Top 1,000 place beside it. Rebuilding your icons while the trophies are still arriving takes nerve.
Twenty years in, the tower’s formula is still the one it opened with: put everything worth doing in one vertical stack, then let the view do the decorating. The winter rebuild just sharpens the stack.
Bangkok has plenty of rooftops now. It still has only one dome, and this winter the dome gets its next act.
