The Oriental counts its age from 1876, when two Danish sea captains, H. Jarck and C. Salje, opened a hotel on the east bank of the Chao Phraya. Nothing of their building is what guests see now. The oldest part of the hotel is the one commissioned by H.N. Andersen, the Danish merchant who bought … Read more
InterContinental Hanoi Westlake stands on West Lake in Tay Ho, and its rooms are, in the MICHELIN Guide’s words, not beside the lake but literally on it. The opening release of 2008 described a main building that “functions as its own island” and three pavilions of 66 rooms each, joined to it by bridges; VnExpress, … Read more
Sun Group, the Vietnamese developer chaired by Đặng Minh Trường, signed Capella Hotel Group in early 2020 to run what the Vietnamese press called the capital’s first five-star boutique hotel, on Lê Phụng Hiểu in the French Quarter, five minutes’ walk from the Opera House. It opened in April 2021, during the pandemic and mostly … Read more
Under the garden of the Metropole, beside the pool bar, is a concrete shelter of seven small rooms that nobody at the hotel could locate until the summer of 2011, when a worker’s drill went through its roof during renovation of the bar. It was flooded. Inside were a wine bottle, a paint can and … Read more
Saigon Times Square fills a block that runs right through from Nguyen Hue Boulevard to Dong Khoi Street, two of the best-known streets of the old centre. Its developer, Times Square Vietnam Investment, a company of the Van Thinh Phat group, announced the twin towers in 2007; work began in 2008, slowed in the financial … Read more
From the street, the tower on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai is plainly new, a modern façade with only hints of Art Deco. It opened in October 2015 as part of Accor’s MGallery collection, and inside, by the Michelin Guide’s description, is a detailed period reconstruction of French Indochina in the 1930s. There are 168 rooms, … Read more
Park Hyatt Saigon is a new building made to look old. When Hyatt opened it in 2005, the brief, as the company put it, was to combine the nostalgic feel of the city’s French colonial history with 21st-century comfort, and its Malaysian designers, Damansara Architects and EDC, gave it an ivory French façade, an antique … Read more
The Upper House occupies floors 38 to 49 of a tower above Pacific Place, Swire Properties’ complex of offices, hotels and shops in Admiralty. It has 117 rooms and opened in October 2009. Three other hotels share the same development, the JW Marriott in the same tower and the Conrad and Island Shangri-La across the … Read more
When The Peninsula opened on Salisbury Road on 11 December 1928, it had 168 rooms in a six-storey building and an unobstructed view across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island. It had been placed for the travellers of its day, beside the quays where the liners docked and the terminus of the railway to Canton, … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong belongs to the International Finance Centre, the development built over Hong Kong Station, the Central terminus of the Airport Railway. Plans for its second phase in 2001 showed a Four Seasons hotel and a Four Seasons Suites tower beside the 88-storey Two IFC, for a consortium that included MTR Corporation, … Read more