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
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
Four Seasons opened its fourth hotel in China in October 2010 on about nine acres of bamboo, lily ponds and lagoons inside the West Lake Scenic Area, beside a UNESCO World Heritage site, the lake itself. The site is that of the Jin Sha Gang cultural village, from which, the company says, the hotel draws … Read more
People lived in this valley west of West Lake in the Tang dynasty, and the place was already called Fayun. Its houses were the homes of families who tended the tea on the slopes around them. When Aman opened Amanfayun in January 2010, its second resort in China, it put its rooms into those houses, … 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
Before Zaha Hadid Architects were given this site in 2012, someone had already started building on it. The foundations of a condominium tower were in the ground at City of Dreams, Melco’s resort in Cotai, and the tower had never been finished. The architects kept them, took the rectangle of the old footprint and extruded … Read more