Mori Building opened talks with the landowners of Azabudai in March 1989, when the site was a narrow, hilly neighbourhood of small houses and wooden buildings. It took nearly 35 years and about 300 landowners: the plan was approved in 2017, construction began in 2019, and Azabudai Hills opened in November 2023, three towers by … Read more
Bvlgari Hotel Tokyo takes the 40th to 45th floors of Tokyo Midtown Yaesu, the tower Mitsui Fudosan developed with a local redevelopment association beside Tokyo Station. Designed by Takenaka Corporation and Nihon Sekkei and completed in August 2022, it also holds offices, shops, the Bus Terminal Tokyo Yaesu and a public elementary school. Yaesu had … Read more
Park Hyatt Tokyo opened in July 1994 as the first Park Hyatt in Asia, on the top fourteen floors of Kenzo Tange’s Shinjuku Park Tower, the three linked towers with glass peaks on the west side of Shinjuku. John Morford’s interiors, in steel, glass and wood, gave it the manner of a private apartment more … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Marunouchi opened in October 2002 with 57 rooms, and still has 57. It occupies a few floors of Pacific Century Place, a 31-storey glass tower linked to Tokyo Station by an underground passage, which Pacific Century Group Japan developed and Nikken Sekkei designed. Yabu Pushelberg did the original interiors, billed … Read more
Otemachi One is a joint development by Mitsui & Co. and Mitsui Fudosan on a site that had held three office buildings, among them Mitsui & Co.’s former headquarters. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the design architect, made each of its two towers answer its surroundings. The shorter one, Mitsui & Co.’s new headquarters, draws on … Read more
Mandarin Oriental’s first Beijing hotel never opened. It was a 241-room hotel in the TVCC building beside the new CCTV headquarters, on track to open in 2009, when fire destroyed the building on 9 February, during the Lantern Festival. The brand’s Beijing debut came ten years later and on a different scale. Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing, … Read more
Jiangbeizui is the financial district Chongqing built on the north bank of the Jialing, where the river flows into the Yangtze, and Regent Chongqing opened there in November 2017. Its owner, the Chongqing developer Casin Group, and Regent presented it as the city’s first “urban resort”, a label that in this case covers three restaurants, … Read more
Chongqing IFS, the towers and mall that Wharf developed with China Overseas Land in the new business district of Jiangbeizui, on the north bank of the Jialing, opened in September 2017, and its hotel came first, on the 8th. Niccolo Chongqing fills floors 52 to 62 of Tower 1, about 300 metres high, and was … Read more
Chaotianmen, at the tip of the Yuzhong peninsula where the Jialing flows into the Yangtze, was one of the seventeen gates of old Chongqing, and after the city was opened to foreign trade in 1891 it became a customs port. The gate itself was pulled down in 1927, the district burned in 1949, and a … Read more
Raffles at Galaxy Macau came out of the third phase of Galaxy Macau, the expansion in which Galaxy Entertainment Group added a convention centre, the 16,000-seat Galaxy Arena and Andaz Macau, and which it presented under Macau’s policy of diversifying beyond gaming. Accor and Galaxy announced the hotel in March 2021 and planned to open … Read more