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
The Oriental counts its age from 1876, when two Danish sea captains, H. Jarck and C. Salje, opened a hotel on the east bank of the Chao Phraya. Nothing of their building is what guests see now. The oldest part of the hotel is the one commissioned by H.N. Andersen, the Danish merchant who bought … 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
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
The Upper House occupies floors 38 to 49 of a tower above Pacific Place, Swire Properties’ complex of offices, hotels and shops in Admiralty. It has 117 rooms and opened in October 2009. Three other hotels share the same development, the JW Marriott in the same tower and the Conrad and Island Shangri-La across the … 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
Mount Qingcheng, west of Chengdu, is where the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice in 142, and Tianshi Cave on its slopes is called the birthplace of Taoism; with the Dujiangyan irrigation system, begun in 256 BC, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000. Six Senses announced its … 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