Raffles Jakarta

The architect and developer Ciputra first saw a painting by Hendra Gunawan in 1962, at his aunt's house; he began to collect the work and became the painter's friend, and he promised him a museum. When his company built Ciputra World 1 in Kuningan, part of the business district Jakartans call the Golden Triangle, he added a 253-metre tower for a hotel. "I did not want just another hotel, a hotel that could be found anywhere," he said; "I wanted to eternalise Hendra's name." The art was written into the scheme from 2007, and Ciputra chose the works himself.

Raffles Jakarta, the brand's first hotel in Indonesia, opened on 16 March 2015. The tower was designed by RTKL with the Jakarta firm Perentjana Djaja, and the interiors by Hirsch Bedner Associates; it has 173 rooms, 44 of them suites.

Hendra's work is in almost every corner: a lobby of burgundy carpet taken from his palette, wall lamps shaped like the talons of the Garuda, a Writers Bar whose panels tell of his childhood, and a garden named after him on the fourteenth floor. Next door, the Ciputra Artpreneur centre houses the museum Ciputra had promised, a gallery and a theatre. In 2018 the centre showed 132 of Hendra's paintings from Ciputra's collection, the largest exhibition of his work; Ciputra died the following year. OKYTO's Jakarta guide compares Kuningan with the city's other districts.

Hendra, a guerrilla in the independence war, was held without trial from 1965 to 1978 for his ties to a leftist cultural group, and painted some of his greatest works in prison. At the door of the hotel his painting of a mother nursing her child, Menyusui, is laid out in mosaic almost the full height of the lobby.

Sources: Raffles; Raffles Jakarta; Bisnis; detikTravel; Indonesia Design; CTBUH; MerahPutih; Raffles Jakarta