Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta

Bundaran HI, the roundabout at the head of Jalan Thamrin, takes its initials from the hotel that faces it. Sukarno had Hotel Indonesia built in about two years for the Asian Games of 1962, as Jakarta's first hotel of international standard and a picture of the modern country he wanted visitors to see. It opened for business that July, and on 5 August he inaugurated it. The architects were Abel Sorensen and his wife, Wendy Becker; by one Indonesian account, Sukarno had admired the United Nations headquarters in New York and sought Sorensen out.

Photo: Post of Indonesia / Wikimedia Commons

InterContinental ran it until 1974 and Sheraton from 1977 to 1981, and in the 1970s Jakarta's elite went up to the Nirwana Supper Club on the top terrace of the sixteen-floor Ramayana Wing. In 1993 the governor declared it a cultural heritage site. OKYTO's history of Hotel Indonesia follows it through those years.

The state still owns it, through PT Hotel Indonesia Natour. After four decades, though, the company put the site out to tender, and the Djarum group won it through a subsidiary under a build-operate-transfer agreement. The hotel closed in 2004. When it reopened on 20 May 2009, under Kempinski management, the rooms had gone from 406 to 289, the Olympic-size pool had been replaced by a smaller one on the roof, and the Grand Indonesia mall, joined to the hotel, covered the site of the old one. The renaming drew protests. It is one of the central hotels compared in OKYTO's Jakarta hotel guide.

Some of 1962 survived the rebuilding: a Bali-themed relief 68 metres long, carved by 53 artists, and a Heritage Room that keeps the scissors Sukarno used to cut the ribbon, a dining set from the opening day and the first lift in Indonesia, built to carry four people.

Sources: Kempinski; detikFinance; GoodNews from Indonesia; Wikipedia; Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta