Close your eyes and imagine Patong in the year 2025? What do you see? Rows and rows of double-storied, dilapidated bars? Music blasting from every dark, drug-infested corner, while bar girls try to shout over loud speakers and incessant horn-blaring to entice drunken foreigners in?

Or do you see a Tokyo-esque Patong? Clean, clear and ordered. Young families skipping down the road, perhaps seeking shade in the corner of Soi Seadragon to enjoy a mint flavoured frappe.

Tanapong Somnam, Executive Director of The Kee Resort & Spa?s vision of the future of Patong is very much of the latter. If you have ever strolled down Thaveewong Rd, where The Kee Resort and Spa is located, then you will understand why he is optimistic about a cleaner, safer and more family-friendly Patong, despite his family also owning Soi Sea Dragon, one of the most ?bustling? of sois off Bangla Road.

The area, that was once, according to Khun Tanapong, dimly-lit, dirty and dangerous, has been completely transformed and looks much unlike any other side soi in Phuket.

The Kee Resort & Spa, The Kee Plaza and the ?entertainment? area of Soi Sea Dragon has been completely renovated, redesigned, rethought and rebooted.

?In the next ten to fifteen years there will be much more of this type of Patong renovation, with big LED screens and technology playing a big part. We placed a huge LED screen on Bangla Road last year, and just a few months later ?Ocean? Department Store had one.?

The LED screen to which he refers, stands at the opening of Soi Sea Dragon and pumps out ADs and short promo videos to the throngs of revellers 24 hours a day.

Most people will have noticed the screen, positioned at the top of the centre structure of bars however many will probably not have ventured down Soi Sea Dragon, to take in the spruced up Go Go bar entrances.

This is just one part of the area?s renovation that includes the Kee Resort & Spa, Patong?s newest high-end resort designed in a Contemporary Sino Portuguese style.

Comprising of 244 guest rooms, a fitness centre, games room, spa, several dining outlets and the Kee Sky Bar, a roof-top bar that offers 360 degree panoramic views of Patong.

Completing the Kee Resort collection is the Kee Plaza: a modern complex attached to the Kee Resort and Spa with more than 60 boutiques, shops and restaurants aligning the calm streets and without a harassing hawker in sight.

?When we (the Somnam family) had the idea to build this, we wanted to make the ?entertainment area? more friendly for families. More modern and clean and safe, before there were dark spots and parts were dangerous, but now it?s more open and we?ve cleaned it up. Not just of garbage but of drugs as well.?

Restaurants, tat, souvenirs, bars, ?entertainment,? rooms, and a glorious swimming pool that encircles the resort. The resort grounds act as a thoroughfare connecting Soi Sea Dragon, Bangla Road and the Beach Road.

It is clearly Khun Tanapong?s idea and hope that his guests and Plaza?s consumers are one and the same. The resort?s guests are even offered various promotions and discounts to the Plaza?s restaurant and stores.

Although the management of the Kee Resort is now very much in Khun Tanapong?s hands, the idea and inspiration for the project, he attributes to the recently-passed matriarch of the family Grandma Suki, or ?Kee? for short.

Although, what with her passing in December of 2010, she didn?t get to see the complete renovation of the area, she did quite literally get to leave her mark, not only through the resort?s name and logo, but also very probably on the future of Patong.