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
Four Seasons Hotel Suzhou occupies a private island of nine hectares on Jinji Lake, reached by a bridge of its own. It is the hotel in Sun Hung Kai Properties’ ensemble in the Suzhou Industrial Park business district, alongside the Lakeside Four Seasons residences and the Suzhou ICC office and retail complex, more than 325,000 … Read more
Tunku Abdul Rahman Park was gazetted in 1974 as Sabah’s second national park, a group of islands just off Kota Kinabalu; Gaya, whose name means big, is the largest of them, and the resort says its forest has been a reserve since 1923. YTL Hotels opened Gaya Island Resort on Malohom Bay on 1 July … Read more
When Andrew and Marit Miners first dived off Batbitim, a small island in the far south of Raja Ampat, they found a shark-finning camp on its beach. Andrew asked the clans who held the area for permission to build a conservation centre there, and the elders gave it. Building began in 2005 and took about … Read more
Ada Villa stands on Observatory Hill, above the Chowrasta promenade at the top of Darjeeling, where the town’s first monastery once stood. In the late nineteenth century it was a boarding house for the young English and Scottish men sent out to manage the tea gardens below. When war came in 1939 it became a … Read more
Amanjiwo was designed as an answer to a single building. Ed Tuttle, the American architect behind many of Aman’s early resorts, set it on the slope of the Menoreh Hills facing Borobudur across the Kedu Plain, and gave its centre the shape of the temple’s summit: a domed rotunda of the pale local limestone called … Read more
The hotel and its school began together. In 2004 Sokoun Chanpreda, a Cambodian businessman who had come home from abroad to invest in his country, started the Shinta Mani School of Hospitality in Siem Reap, giving free training to young Cambodians from poor families; according to the hotel, the classroom was converted staff housing. Bill … Read more
In December 1929 the colonial government of Indochina gave the Société des Grands Hôtels Indochinois a contract for new hotels at Siem Reap, Phnom Penh, Dalat and Phan Thiet, for the travellers who were beginning to come to Angkor. The company went bankrupt in 1931 with the Siem Reap hotel still unfinished, and Alfred Messner, … 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
Before the Second World War Japan promoted a programme of international tourist hotels, built to receive foreign visitors, and fourteen were completed. A 2022 survey of the type counts the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama and the Unzen Kanko Hotel among them, and calls the group the source of Japanese hotel architecture. One was the … Read more