The plot at 1-1-1 Marunouchi first held the office of the Imperial Household’s forestry bureau. In 1947, on the orders of the occupation authorities, the building was turned into the Hotel Teito, a state-run hotel for foreign buyers. The state sold it in 1959; a new company, Palace Hotel, was incorporated in February 1960, and … Read more
Rong Cheng, a Taiwanese paper company, came to Fuyang, on the Fuchun River south-west of Hangzhou, looking for a site for a mill. According to the Taiwanese magazine Global Views, its honorary chairman, Cheng Cheng-hsiung, a keen golfer, judged the tea-covered hills too good to spend on papermaking, and the company decided instead on 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
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
Wynn Palace opened at eight in the evening on 22 August 2016, Wynn’s first resort on Cotai, ten years after Wynn Macau on the peninsula. It had cost US$4.2 billion, taken six and a half years to design and come in months late, and it had 1,706 rooms, suites and villas in a tower of … 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
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