The Chow Tai Fook Finance Centre stands 530 metres over Zhujiang New Town, the planned business district on the Pearl River in Tianhe, so the view from the hotel is of the new city. New World Development, the Cheng family’s property company, built it to a design by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which won the competition … Read more
When GIC invested in Capital Place in October 2013, the hotel planned for the complex on Jalan Gatot Subroto was described as a St Regis, the first all-suite hotel in Jakarta, to be managed by Starwood. Its developer, Rajawali Property Group, also owned the city’s existing Four Seasons on Jalan Rasuna Said, which closed in … Read more
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 … Read more
Rosewood Bangkok rises 30 storeys on Ploenchit Road, and its silhouette answers a planning guideline as much as a gesture. Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects, explain that the sloping form responds to Bangkok’s setback guidelines: as the tower climbs it steps back, which creates terraces and smaller floor plates. The same incline carries … Read more
The architect and developer Ciputra first saw a painting by Hendra Gunawan in 1962, at his aunt’s house; he began to collect the work and became the painter’s friend, and he promised him a museum. When his company built Ciputra World 1 in Kuningan, part of the business district Jakartans call the Golden Triangle, he … Read more
When Ben Taechaubol of Country Group Development first saw the 5.75-hectare plot on Charoenkrung Road in 2009, it was home to about thirty tenants, among them a fishery, and it took five years, he told The Peak, to relocate them equitably. “We knew straight away that something wonderful could be built there,” he said. What … Read more
When Bulgari announced a resort in Bali in November 2003, it was to be the second hotel of Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, after Milan, and its first resort. The Italian jeweller licensed its name and Marriott’s luxury group was to run the hotel, while the developer was MRA Group & Partners, the Indonesian company that … Read more
Before 1998 the Singapore businessman Ong Beng Seng acquired a rice terrace on the Ayung River at Sayan, “practically next door to the Amandari”, as the South China Morning Post put it, and gave it to a Singapore-born architect working in London, John Heah of Heah & Co. Heah’s aim was to break into the … Read more
Peter Muller, an Adelaide architect of the Sydney School, began imagining a hotel in the manner of a Balinese highland village in 1970, when few visitors went to Ubud, and spent almost twenty years looking for someone who believed travellers would leave the coast for the hills. He had already shown at the Kayu Aya, … 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