Few hotels are as synonymous with old world grandeur and colonial architecture as the Raffles Hotel Singapore — the hotel of choice for the city-state’s visiting elite since it first opened in 1887.
Guests from Rudyard Kipling to Catherine, Princess of Wales have graced its hallways, which like the rest of the hotel were revamped in 2019 after a two-year restoration rumored to have cost upward of $200 million.
Built upon three hectares near the city’s Central Business District, the hotel is itself a tourist attraction. Visitors stop to photograph its ornate façade or to sip a Singapore Sling at the drink’s birthplace, the hotel’s Long Bar.
But half of the hotel is reserved for guests only, said Managing Director Christian Westbeld.
“The most luxurious element of any stay with us is that you get a feeling, when you enter our premises, that time ticks in a different way,” he told CNBC. “Everything slows down in our walls.”
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This article was originally published on CNBC