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"View Slideshow\n\nThe \"hill station,\" an invention of Western colonialists craving relief from the heat of low-lying Asian cities, is still dispensing cool mountain breezes. The British in India went to Simla in the Himalayas; the Dutch in Indonesia to Bandung; the French in Indochina to the invigorating 5,000-foot altitude of Dalat. Today, tourists who journey to the resort town on the Lang Bian plateau, 155 miles from Ho Chi Minh City in Lam Dong province, can seek haven at the new Ana Mandara Villas Dalat\u2014Resort and Spa, set on 35 pine-covered acres on the city's outskirts.\n\nMost of the 15 guest villas were built in the 1920s and '30s. At the conclusion of the French war in Vietnam, in 1954, prosperous Vietnamese occupied them. After the American war ended in 1975, each villa was given over to several families.\n\n\"Every family installed temporary exhaust pipes, sticking out from windows and walls, for their cooking and built in simple toilet and bath facilities and even mezzanine decks for accommodating additional people,\" says Bernhard Bohnenberger, the hotel executive who worked with Habita in Bangkok and Parisian designer Brigitte Dumont de Chassart on gutting the structures and transforming them into three- to five-bedroom villas with en suite baths, as well as dining rooms, living rooms and pantries. \"There are fireplaces in all the villas and four-poster beds and claw-foot tubs in many,\" Bohnenberger adds.\n\nThe buildings are numbered and named, some for the vocations of people who figured prominently in Vietnam's history. The Scientist's Villa, with its exceptionally pretty exterior staircase, honors Alexandre Yersin, the French-Swiss physician and bacteriologist who spent most of his life in Vietnam. Villa 20 is called the Bellevue, for the pleasing 240-degree views it offers from its large balcony.\n\nGuests are welcomed in an open-air reception area and driven to their lodging in one of the hotel's two 1942 Peugeots. Guest rooms are predominantly furnished with reproductions of French colonial-style chairs, tables and desks\u2014manufactured in various Vietnamese cities, such as Nha Trang\u2014which convey the flavor of a bygone era. Bohnenberger's associates also procured a number of vintage gramophones in working order and a collection of 78-rpm records.\n\nThe hotel is Dalat's first to have a swimming pool, and early-morning yoga classes are offered poolside. Some guests venture into the city or to a nearby lake\u2014by shuttle bus, by SUV or in one of the resort's two Citro\u00EBn convertibles that date back to the 1930s. Others take expeditions to a nearby coffee plantation or try their hand at picking strawberries, a fruit for which the region is renowned. A hotel chef will prepare the strawberries and serve them with cream and sparkling wine at a table set up in the field. The more adventurous may opt for trekking, mountain biking or rock climbing.\n\nGuests who go on an excursion to Dalat's morning market may eat a bowl of pho, Vietnam's classic hot noodle soup, for breakfast there and return to the hotel for a cooking lesson. Some meals are taken in the villas' dining rooms, but few visitors will want to forgo a dinner in the restaurant, called Nine after its street address, 9 Le Lai. It serves food variously described as French bistro and Indochinese fusion.\n\nThe restaurant villa survived the aftermath of the American war in pretty good shape. The red-and-white dining room floor tiles are original, as are the ebony-dark staircases on either side of a fireplace. The stairs lead to a cozy wine cellar\u2014located in the attic\u2014and a wine bar with a counter made from local timber and a first-rate selection of wines. The French colonials who once frequented Dalat, and who valued good food and wine, would have approved."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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