Maxx Royal Kemer Resort

Maxx Royal Kemer Resort

Maxx Royal Kemer Resort occupies the site of the old Kiriş World Hotel, a 1987-built property that stood on the lower slopes of the Taurus Mountains until it was replaced, in 2014, by the current building on a 150,000 square metre plot of pine forest, bay, and beach in the town of Kiriş, roughly 26 miles from Antalya airport. The resort was designed by the Istanbul practice Baraka Architects, who worked the steep hillside instead of fighting it, terracing the family suites into the slope and keeping the flattest ground for the main building. There are 291 rooms in total: 133 suites of around 100 square metres in the main building, 84 family suites of 185 square metres stepped up the hillside, 59 laguna villas of between 150 and 310 square metres along the beach, and 15 beach villas of up to 450 square metres, the largest with three bedrooms and a private pool. It is the second Maxx Royal property, opened three years after the first, in Belek, both built by twin brothers Mehmet and Murat Ersoy, who founded the tour operator Etstur in 1991 and grew it into Etsgrup, one of Turkey's largest travel groups. Inside, the material of note is stone: pieces of slate roughly 14 centimetres thick, stacked in the masonry style of the region along both faces of the villas' concrete frames, so the walls read as something built into the landscape rather than added to it. The main building is wrapped in timber screens that double as sunbreakers and balustrades, a nod to the pine forest surrounding it. Food runs across six restaurants, chief among them Gastro by Alfredo Russo, run under the guidance of the Michelin-starred Turin chef, alongside Bronze Steak House for aged meats and Bishoku for Japanese cooking served with sea views; Azure Court covers international à la carte, with a bakery, Le Melange, and an on-site chocolatier for anyone wanting dessert on demand. Every guest is assigned a Maxx Assistant, reachable through an app, and villa guests get a private butler on top of that. The spa, Maxx Wellbeing, runs both Turkish therapies and more clinical treatments. What it feels like is scale handled with some intention: three separate beaches, Long Beach at around 400 metres, Middle Bay for families with its shallow swimming area, and Tangerine Beach for watersports and music, each pitched at a different kind of day. Families move between the aquapark, the kids' clubs, and the beach cabanas without leaving the property's boundary, while villa guests keep a private pool and butler between themselves and the rest of the resort. It suits people who want a full-service holiday without having to think about logistics, and it suits multigenerational groups particularly well, since a three-bedroom beach villa and a pair of hillside suites can house the same family in very different registers of privacy. You should not come if you want a small, quiet property where the same twenty guests recognise each other by the pool; this is a 291-key resort built for volume, with entertainment most evenings and a beach that fills by mid-morning in July and August. You should come for a version of Turkish all-inclusive that takes its architecture and its kitchens seriously, and for the chance to disappear into a beach villa for a week without seeing anyone but your own butler. The short version: A 291-room all-inclusive resort on the Taurus Mountains' lower slopes near Kemer, built in 2014 on a former hotel site, with stone-walled beach villas, six restaurants including one under Alfredo Russo, and three beaches suited to different moods.