The Peninsula Hong Kong

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, a story told in our history of the hotel. The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, which built it, still owns it as the flagship of the group.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The open view did not last. The government allowed a museum complex on reclaimed land across the road: the Space Museum opened there in 1980, and the Cultural Centre followed at the end of the decade on the site of the old railway terminus, whose clock tower was kept. Writing in 1996, the Financial Times correspondent Frank Gray listed the museums among three reasons the hotel had to rebuild, with the demand for rooms and, in his words, the ending of building height limits in Kowloon. The water is still there, beyond the museums and the promenade that runs in front of them to the Star Ferry pier, but the six-storey building had lost the view Gray called unobstructed.

Photo: Hoispenard / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

The tower behind the old hotel

The answer went up at the back. Rocco Design, Rocco Yim's practice, drew a 30-storey tower on the site of the hotel's rear podium, while the 1928 facade, the forecourt and the lobby were kept in front. It opened in 1994, added 132 rooms, nearly doubling the hotel, and put the harbour back in its windows, seen over the museums from above. Gray's verdict was that the tower "reclaims that view".

Photo: Bernard Spragg / Wikimedia Commons · CC0

Ever since, the two buildings have divided the hotel's life between them. The old one kept the ceremony: the colonnaded, double-height Lobby, where afternoon tea is still served to live music; Gaddi's, the French restaurant opened in 1953; Spring Moon, the Cantonese room with Art Deco stained glass, opened in 1986; and the forecourt, where the Rolls-Royces in Peninsula green wait at the fountain. The tower took the view. Felix, the restaurant and bar Philippe Starck designed for its 28th floor, has looked across the harbour since the tower opened, and the spa's treatment rooms and the eighth-floor pool face the water too.

The rooms

Since 2013 the rooms in both buildings have shared one scheme. All of them were remade in 2012 and 2013, the tower first and the original building in time for the hotel's 85th anniversary year, in a HK$450 million programme by the group's in-house designers with Gettys: cream and dark chocolate tones, stitched leather, burl wood, drawer pulls modelled on the handles of old travel trunks, and in-room technology designed by the company's own engineers.

That scheme is now more than a decade old. In August 2026 the owners approved a new renovation, shared with The Peninsula Tokyo and budgeted at about HK$2.1 billion for the two, with no timetable published; the company said that preserving the building's heritage and character was a key consideration.

What still differs is the outlook, and the hotel describes it plainly. In the original building, the Deluxe Rooms on three sides look out over the shopping streets, and the Courtyard rooms and suites look down on the forecourt. The harbour belongs to the categories that carry it in their names, and to The Peninsula Suite, 377 square metres at the top of the tower. A courtyard room gives a view of the hotel's own arrivals; the view Gray described is the tower's.

Sources: The Peninsula Hong Kong; Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels; Cigar Aficionado; HKIA Journal; Luxury Travel Advisor; South China Morning Post.