Raffles Jakarta Opens With the Art of Hendra Gunawan

Raffles Jakarta opened in March 2015 in Kuningan, one of the business districts of the Indonesian capital. It was the first Raffles in Indonesia, and the twelfth in a collection that began with the 1887 hotel in Singapore. It has 173 rooms and suites, among the largest in the city, in a tower of the Ciputra World development.

What distinguishes it is its relationship with art. The hotel is connected to Ciputra Artpreneur, a centre that opened the year before with a museum, a gallery and a theatre of 1,200 seats that stages international productions. Both were created by the Ciputra family, whose founder, the developer Ciputra, was the friend and patron of Hendra Gunawan, one of the most important Indonesian painters of the 20th century, and assembled the largest collection of his work.

Hendra’s paintings, with their saturated colour and scenes of everyday Indonesian life, are the theme of the hotel. Originals hang in the public rooms, motifs from them appear in carpets, glass and fabrics, and a garden on the fourteenth floor was laid out with his canvases in mind. The Writers Bar, a name carried over from Singapore, was reinterpreted as a tribute to literature and to Indonesian art.

The hotel opened with the Arts Café, an all-day restaurant with an open kitchen, and Navina, by the pool, with further restaurants to follow. Its leisure facilities are unusually generous for a city hotel: several pools, tennis courts, a jogging track and a yoga terrace in tropical gardens, and a spa with six treatment rooms. The ballroom, of 2,500 square metres, is one of the largest in Jakarta.

Richard Schestak, the general manager at opening, summed up the approach by saying that good service is not only about what you give people but about how you make them feel.

Raffles later added a second Indonesian property, Raffles Bali, in 2020. In the capital, the hotel’s competitors include The Langham, Jakarta. OKYTO’s pages on Raffles Jakarta and Jakarta have the details.