Fairmont Peace Hotel

The Fairmont Peace Hotel stands at the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road in Shanghai, in the Art Deco tower that Victor Sassoon completed in 1929 as Sassoon House, with the Cathay Hotel on its upper floors. It has been owned by the Jinjiang group since 1984 and run by Fairmont since 2010. It is now being renovated while it stays open, and is due to relaunch in 2027 as the Raffles Peace Hotel Shanghai.

No building on the Bund says as much about the city of the 1930s.

Sassoon House

Sassoon, whose family traded across Asia, built his headquarters on the Bund. Designed by the Hong Kong firm Palmer and Turner, it was faced in granite, with terracotta on the upper floors and a steep pyramid roof clad in copper, now weathered to green, that remains one of the landmarks of the river front. The Cathay Hotel occupied the floors above his offices.

Across Nanjing Road stands the older Palace Hotel, completed in 1908. The two buildings were later joined under one name, the Peace Hotel. Today the southern building is The Swatch Art Peace Hotel, with studios for artists in residence, and the Fairmont occupies Sassoon House.

Rooms dressed as other countries

The hotel closed in 2007 for a three-year restoration and reopened in 2010 as part of Fairmont, with rooms and suites throughout the tower. Its signature suites keep an idea from the Cathay years: each was decorated in the style of a different nation. The eighth floor holds the Peace Hall, used for receptions, and the hotel's Old Jazz Band, a group of veteran musicians, inspired a film, As Time Goes By.

Becoming Raffles

In May 2025 the owners and Accor announced that the hotel would be renovated in stages and would move to the Raffles brand in 2027, keeping the features protected as cultural relics. Shanghai has gained several hotels on and near the Bund in recent years, among them the Regent on the former Seagull site, and The Peninsula Shanghai. The Peace Hotel's position does not depend on any of them. It is the building on the postcards, and the one a walk along the Bund begins with.

Sources: TTG Asia; Wikipedia.