Star fighter Tharoth Sam finds far more than a place to switch off in Kep
The actress and MMA champion came to the Knai Bang Chatt to breathe. She left wondering how little she knew of her own coast — and thinking about what Jef Moons is trying to build there.
Tharoth Sam is one of Cambodia's best-known faces abroad. A ONE Championship veteran and an actress seen in First They Killed My Father, she is used to cameras, crowds and noise. At the Knai Bang Chatt, it was the opposite that caught her. In the city it's always chaos, she says. Here she went quiet, breathed in the sea air and felt her shoulders drop.
She thought she already knew this corner of Kep. She didn't. This time she was given a room with the sea on one side and the hills on the other, and she says the place shifted her mood the moment she walked in.
Across from her sits the man behind the place. Jef Moons arrived in Kep in 2003 and restored three old houses — the provincial governor's, the customs chief's and a princess's. Those houses became the Knai Bang Chatt. So she put the question to him plainly: how did you start, and where are you going?
Small, by choice
Moons keeps the place deliberately small. Eighteen rooms, around ninety staff, a management team both Cambodian and international. He talks about a regenerative resort and refuses the word “hotel.” “You never just book a room,” he says. Guests find a discovery centre, artist residencies, a seafront, four restaurants and a sailing club. Families come. Solo travellers too.
Ask him what really makes the place work, and he doesn't point to the architecture. “Our main asset is my staff,” he says. “They're the ones who put you at ease, who welcome you.”
Beyond the beach
The resort no longer stands alone. It runs under the same banner as Kep West and Art for Kep, and Moons's plans now reach well past the shore. He says the national government has approved what he calls the Southeast Asian Ocean Gallery: an underwater museum launched this year and planned over ten.
It's a lot to take in, and Sam says so.
To build it, Moons travels to Europe, meeting foundations and artists he wants to pair with Cambodian names. Add to that filed plans for the mangroves and an exhibition esplanade near the crab market, which would double as a visitor centre. This year alone, he says, close to a hundred artists will pass through the Knai Bang Chatt.
Cambodia has 450 kilometres of coastline, Moons points out, and the Kep and Kampot stretch will be built on its art, its culture and its communities. This is where the conversation turned personal. Sam admitted, without hedging, that she was surprised — a Cambodian discovering her own coast through a foreigner who has lived here more than twenty years. She had come to unwind; she left with the sense that there's a whole part of her country she hasn't met yet.
Kep West
Kep West is the group behind the Knai Bang Chatt. It ties the resort to its other ventures on the coast — the Crab & Co restaurant, the Kep West Wellness centre and the Art for Kep residency programme. The through-line is a bet on Kep itself: that hospitality and art, built alongside the local community, can give this stretch of coast a name of its own.
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