Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
Heritage Hotels
Among starchitect-designed and futuristic towers is a clutch of grand old hotels, restored and revived to tell the story of Singapore’s history
Singapore’ s skyline boasts an impressive collection of buildings designed by Pritzker Prize laureates and starchitects, including Thomas Heatherwick, Ole Scheeren, Norman Foster, Moshe Safdie, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, but beneath all that modern gloss, an older, more storied Singapore still pulses.
This history is particularly evident in the small clutch of grand old hotels that dot the island. Individually, each represents a unique glimpse into Singapore’s colonial past, a veritable time capsule of how travellers of yore once toured the world. Collectively, they represent a remarkable, ongoing effort by Singapore’s urban planners, working with commercial developers, to balance historical value, contemporary relevance and future purpose.
The first that comes to mind is Raffles, its glorious high-Victorian Italianate revival facade and interiors long a byword among the jet set for authentic retro style. After a twoand-a-half-year restoration by a crack team of local and international conservators, architects and designers, including New York-based Champalimaud Design, the 133-year-old hotel reopened in 2019. Its soaring lobby is a white cocoon framed by copper screens and a huge chandelier dripping with crystals, while its lofty suites are layered with Peranakan-inspired floor tiles, bianco dolomite and abstract art.
Though it’s a few decades younger than Raffles, the Goodwood Park Hotel still holds its own in the heritage stakes. Built by Swan & Maclaren in 1900 as the Teutonia Club for Singapore’s German expatriate community, its distinctive silhouette was inspired by the fairy-tale castles of the Rhine region. Its high-ceilinged interiors, though — complete with fluted columns, classical archways and highly decorative plasterwork, alongside wooden-shuttered poolside suites — have been consistently refreshed and modernised in the intervening century, most recently by local architect Ernesto Bedmar.
But it’s the Fullerton Hotel that arguably makes the grandest statement. Designed by Keys & Dowdeswell and completed in 1928, its rugged neoclassical bulk is framed by imposing Doric columns and clad in grey Aberdeen granite. Over the years, the building — which was designated a national monument in 2015 — was used variously as the general post office, the exclusive Singapore Club, the temporary residence of the British governor and the Japanese military’s administrative headquarters during the Second World War.
The Capitol Kempinski Hotel is another encouraging example of urban planners working hand-in-hand with developers to repurpose antique piles that might otherwise have faced the bulldozer. Here Richard Meier wedded two early 20th-century landmarks — RAJ Bidwell’s Venetian Renaissance-style Stamford House and Keys & Dowdeswell’s Capitol Theatre and Capitol Building — into a 50,000-square-metre mixed-used development. Anchoring the handsome allwhite restoration is the Kempinski, whose charming high-corniced ceilings, dramatic archways and grand windows are balanced by the late interior designer Jaya Ibrahim’s contemporary palette of cream, taupe, warm wood, lacquered rosewood, silver nickel and polished marble.
And though not a grande dame hotel like the others, The Warehouse Hotel is a delightful piece of nostalgia reimagined for the 21st century. Architecture firm Zarch Collaboratives and design studio Asylum turned a trio of cavernous 19th-century godowns on Robertson Quay into a slick boutique hotel. The warehouses were originally built to store spices, then became secret society nests and moonshine distilleries in the early 20th century and, finally, a wildly popular disco in the 1980s; this colourful past is glimpsed most vividly in the soaring rafters, exposed brickwork and conserved arched windows.