Loved this place, the room and balcony are huge and well laid out, the setting is fabulous and you get a real sense of calm as it's a small hotel. Service in the restaurant can be a bit haphazard at times (this was something that seemed to be common across Langkawi though!) but the food and cocktails are excellent and the small touches like the free evening cocktail and canapes during sunset really set this place apart from the more corporate hotel chains. The pool is great, the beach is lovely and the staff are really friendly.

We stayed for 5 days and 4 nights.

Overall the hotel, grounds and facilities are reasonable. The resort itself has great potential for being a boutique hotel with the selling point of living close to nature.

What we liked:
- Rooms are really large and spacious. Nice big balcony with a day bed. Firm and comfortable beds. Pillows a bit on the soft side
- Large bathroom and lovely complimentary crabtree and evelyn toiletries. Nice strong water pressure and rainshower. Although one of the nights we had a bit of issue with the hot water as we were showering in tepid cool water for some reason. Not too sure what happened
- Lush and quiet location and villas are located in a reserve with private beach. You get dropped off at the main gate and normally ferried around by the minivan or the buggies. Close to nature and even with the resort being fully booked, we hardly see or hear anyone apart from a couple of rather unsupervised rowdy kids in the pool (depending on your luck) We had the misfortune of checking in with various loud chinese families and was plagued by them either at the pool area or beach. Nothing an iphone and noise reducing earphones cannot resolve
- decent breakfast spread and ** complimentary cocktail and canapes at sunset** at the restaurant
- Nice terrace area which is ideal for the sunset

What we disliked:

1) Quality of service and service staff let the hotel down. For example:
- On check in, no details of the hotel facilities are provided by the front desk (where anything is, where/when breakfast is served, mention of free cocktail and snacks at sunset, which we accidentally discovered on the last day). we were simply shown to our room without a clue how anything works in the resort.
- Service staff also not very helpful, have to repeat questions and requests over and over - We hired a car and the reception when asked for recommendations to visit, offered no suggestions on places to visit and "it is all on the map".
- Told at breakfast that unable to order eggs from non waiting staff who were nowhere to be seen, not informed at breakfast that there are other choices available, e.g omelettes, eggs, pancakes etc.
- Hotel does offer free wifi but when we asked about connection, reception staff was indifferent or not very helpful. We were told just look for the wifi name tanjung sanctuary (despite us not getting any wifi signal or when the "technician" arrived, my husband was asked to move to another seat at the reception to connect to the wifi as he saw someone else being able to access the wifi in that spot. We had to eventually ask them for the relevant IP address
- Restaurant service staff - sometimes a hit or miss with the service level. When we tried to order our second cocktail (first one is complimentary), the waiter had inform us that the 2nd drink is not complimentary. i) the staff started to retreat before I could confirm that it was fine to charge the room; ii) when asked how much were the cocktails we ordered, he looked confused and had to check while we waited for another 5 to 10 mins before returning
- On the morning of check out, called reception twice to request a lift to the reception, still no buggy after waiting over 15 mins so we had to lug all of our heavy bags to the reception by ourselves. Not a pleasant way to end our stay at the hotel

Some other areas to note:
- pool area small. beach very quiet but small and little shade from the sun.
- depending on your preference, the hotel has lots of nature outside and inside the rooms, be prepared for visits from geckos and the occasional bugs. we had to dodge a couple of geckos nightly when getting into the room every night as they are hanging about outside the entrance. To add to the tension, there was a huge gecko hiding behind the sign with the room number. I have no idea how big the gecko is but the head was as big as my fist (shudder)
- monkeys are a regular affair around the resort. They do regularly come to the balcony of the villa so lock the door before you leave the room. We had one tapping on our balcony door wanting to be let in on the first day with plenty of others lurking on the railing looking in. As a result, we had not ventured to the day bed on the balcony as not sure if the monkeys had used it before us.... another of their favourite spot is the trees near the pool in the mid afternoon as they bounded across the roof of the restaurant and jump onto the trees. We found them amusing, but probably not if you are not a big fan of nature or monkeys
- hornbills are also a regular affair, keep an eye out for them near the villas 816 as we saw a nest on the very tall trees. They tend to fly around the pool area before dusk
- the resort is located on the side of a gentle hill so there is a bit of slope and stairs. The villas are within walking distance to the main reception, at most a 5 to 7 min stroll - fine if you are not carrying heavy bags, not soo great if you have to drag a heavy luggage

We stayed for 5 days and 6 nights and the resort itself is beautiful. Great view from the rooms (we had a beach view) and overall we loved the seclusion the place offered. However, the service was terrible. The concierge couldn't recommend us any nice restaurants, barely spoke English, booked us a wrong adventure tour and lost our spa appointments. Moreover, the private beach definitely needs to be cleaned and taken care of; we opted to stay at the pool rather after seeing the beach. We ordered lunch at noon at the beach bar and we were informed that the chef was on his lunch break so we'll have to wait until he comes back... Overall, great rooms and surrounding, however, we wouldn't recommend it to anyone who likes to have a concierge and a help desk at their hotel.

We stayed (couple) for 5 nights in Jan 2012... and were completely bowled over by the place. Rooms are great, large, convenient. All mod-cons, including wi-fi in the room. Private beach is truly private and wonderful, serene. Surrounding area is rain-forest, not landscaped artificially. Plenty of birds, monkeys around. Service is very friendly, smiling. Food quality is wonderful - although we mostly had only breakfasts here. Although seems 'cut off', it is actually very close to busier areas, markets etc - so we drove around to different places for food, very nice. All in all, excellent experience ... and we are waiting to go back soon!