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
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
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
In 2002 Fuzhou, in Jiangxi province, approved the Liaofang reservoir, which was to flood a stretch of villages and camphor groves outside the city. Ma Dadong, who had grown up there and left at 22 for a business career in Shanghai, heard about it on a visit to his parents. He was 29, and he … Read more