Sun Group, the Vietnamese developer chaired by Đặng Minh Trường, signed Capella Hotel Group in early 2020 to run what the Vietnamese press called the capital’s first five-star boutique hotel, on Lê Phụng Hiểu in the French Quarter, five minutes’ walk from the Opera House. It opened in April 2021, during the pandemic and mostly … Read more
Under the garden of the Metropole, beside the pool bar, is a concrete shelter of seven small rooms that nobody at the hotel could locate until the summer of 2011, when a worker’s drill went through its roof during renovation of the bar. It was flooded. Inside were a wine bottle, a paint can and … Read more
From the street, the tower on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai is plainly new, a modern façade with only hints of Art Deco. It opened in October 2015 as part of Accor’s MGallery collection, and inside, by the Michelin Guide’s description, is a detailed period reconstruction of French Indochina in the 1930s. There are 168 rooms, … Read more
Park Hyatt Saigon is a new building made to look old. When Hyatt opened it in 2005, the brief, as the company put it, was to combine the nostalgic feel of the city’s French colonial history with 21st-century comfort, and its Malaysian designers, Damansara Architects and EDC, gave it an ivory French façade, an antique … Read more
When The Peninsula opened on Salisbury Road on 11 December 1928, it had 168 rooms in a six-storey building and an unobstructed view across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island. It had been placed for the travellers of its day, beside the quays where the liners docked and the terminus of the railway to Canton, … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong belongs to the International Finance Centre, the development built over Hong Kong Station, the Central terminus of the Airport Railway. Plans for its second phase in 2001 showed a Four Seasons hotel and a Four Seasons Suites tower beside the 88-storey Two IFC, for a consortium that included MTR Corporation, … Read more
Niccolo Chengdu fills Tower 3 of Chengdu IFS, the mixed-use quarter of some 760,000 square metres that the Hong Kong group Wharf built at the junction of Hongxing Road and Dacisi Road, with towers by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Wharf pitched the project in 2011 as “an oasis within Chengdu”, modelled on its Wheelock Square in … Read more
Before it was Rosewood Beijing, the hotel in Jing Guang Centre, a tower completed in 1989, was the Jing Guang New World Hotel, a property of New World, the group of Hong Kong’s Cheng family. In June 2011 New World Hospitality, chaired by Sonia Cheng, agreed to buy Rosewood Hotels & Resorts for US$229.5 million, … Read more
The hotel’s address is 81 Bitieshi Street, a lane of about a hundred metres that is the only street in Chengdu with a name taken from Manchu. A bithesi was a clerk of the Qing administration, and the lane, the Sichuan press notes, still holds traces of a Qing government office found nowhere else in … Read more
In 2002 Fuzhou, in Jiangxi province, approved the Liaofang reservoir, which was to flood a stretch of villages and camphor groves outside the city. Ma Dadong, who had grown up there and left at 22 for a business career in Shanghai, heard about it on a visit to his parents. He was 29, and he … Read more