Yangcheng Lake, north-east of Suzhou, is where the Chinese mitten crab, the hairy crab of the autumn markets, takes its name and its reputation; the season runs from September to December, and the lake town has spent the last few years trying to give visitors reasons to come in the other months. Banyan Group opened … Read more
Birie is a small, uninhabited island in Raja Ampat, just behind the larger island of Batanta, and the resort occupies a peninsula on its north-eastern side. Its 26 bungalows stand on stilts over the house reef, built of local wood under thatch, each with a two-tier veranda facing the sunset; the diving writer John Liddiard … Read more
In 1982 Klaus Schleusener, a professor at IIT Madras, built himself a winter house with the Swiss architect Karl Damschen on a bare hill near the village of Pulinkudi, about ten kilometres from Trivandrum. It was octagonal. Friends kept coming to stay, so, as Kalpana Sunder told the story in India Currents, he bought more … Read more
Alistair Shearer, a British writer on India, tells the story in a few lines on his own website: he and “a couple of friends” bought twelve acres of coconut-palm grove on what he calls the isolated coast of Malabar, and the result is Neeleshwar Hermitage. He describes himself as its co-founder and gives evening lectures … Read more
Tentrem is a Javanese word that the hotel translates as peacefulness and tranquillity. The owners are the Hidayat family, whose company, Sido Muncul, is a large maker of jamu, the traditional herbal medicine, and of the cold remedy Tolak Angin. Sultan Hamengku Buwono X, governor of the province, laid the first stone on 29 April … Read more
Xi’an, the capital of thirteen dynasties, grew on a north–south grid. In the High-Tech Zone in the south of the city, where the developer Zhongda built its mixed-use THE CITY on Keji 2nd Road, a newer grid runs slightly off that axis. WATG, the architects, placed the hotel where the two meet: the hotel tower … Read more
Bill Bensley designed the Hotel de la Paix in 2002, on Sivutha Boulevard in the middle of Siem Reap, and it became one of the best-regarded hotels in Cambodia. Ten years later it closed for a fourteen-month renovation, again by Bensley, and in August 2013 it reopened as Park Hyatt Siem Reap, Hyatt’s first hotel … Read more
King Norodom Sihanouk wanted a place near Angkor where he could lodge his family and visiting dignitaries, and in 1962 the French architect Laurent Mondet began the Villa Princière for him on the road from Siem Reap to the temples. Completed in 1963, it was a low, modern building around a curving pool and lawn, … Read more
In Chinese, The Ritz-Carlton, Shenzhen is 深圳星河丽思卡尔顿酒店, the Shenzhen Galaxy Ritz-Carlton. Galaxy is Shenzhen Galaxy Industrial Company, with which Ritz-Carlton developed the hotel as part of the Galaxy Ritz-Carlton Hotel & Office Complex; the English name leaves it out. Ritz-Carlton opened it in March 2009 in the Futian business district, facing the Shenzhen Convention and … Read more
Muwa Niseko occupies the top of Grand Hirafu village, ski-in and ski-out, and some of its units open straight onto the snow. South Korea’s Hanwha group developed it, GK H-SUMMIT operates it under the MUWA brand, and it took its first guests on 15 December 2023, with 113 rooms. It is a condominium hotel: the … Read more