18 DIGS.NET | 10.15.2021
expanding its accommodations. "Raffles Singapore is one of the
few remaining great 19th century hotels in the world and its
restoration has been carefully designed to preserve its unique
historic charm, while creating extraordinary experiences for
our esteemed guests," notes Manager Christian Westbeld, the
hotel's general manager.
Given this good and gracious buffing, today the national
treasure of a hotel with an international profile is poised to enter
a glorious new era. There is, predictably, plenty of glory to go
around. Raffles is a haven of opulence and escape; not in an
exaggerated sense, but in a way that evokes a PBS Masterpiece
drama, presenting itself as a product of another, more entrancing
era, with its abundance of quality and character manifesting
in liveried doormen, a lustrous grand lobby, polished teak
verandas, lush tropical gardens and glacier-white marble
colonnades. It's all faintly novelistic. Now, as the next chapter
begins for the fabled hotel, one hopes it will never end.
Acclaimed interior designer, Alexandra Champalimaud,
supported by global architecture and design firm Aedas, helmed
the restoration, and together they achieved a kind of aria in
physical form—harmonious, if slightly operatic in scope. While
the effort to conserve the architecture is not keenly observed,
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): THE HOTEL'S GRACEFUL, WELL-TENDED LAWN;
AN ENTRANCE BOTH ARTISTIC AND EXOTIC; THE ELEGANT CIRCULAR
ENTRANCE AND FRONT-FACING FACADE.
