Our Dispatch series dispatches with the chatter and gets right to the heart of our mission: hotel curation. For you now, a selection of hotels that sum up the hospitality scene in Singapore.
This August we’re taking a little inspiration from our European brethren and shifting the gears down a few notches, getting into vacation mode, and giving you some simple, easily digestible hotel curation content. We won’t spend a half-dozen or so paragraphs up here describing a place and explaining why you should visit it. Instead, we’ll just let the hotels do the talking, choosing for you a collection of standout accommodations that represent the range of culture, character, history, luxury, and landscape on offer.
Without further ado, here is a list of top hotels that tell the story of hospitality in Singapore. To see our entire selection of hotels in Singapore, click here.
Duxton Reserve
Singapore (Chinatown)
Singapore’s Chinatown is one of the world’s most unique neighborhoods, and it’s here, in a row of five well-preserved 19th-century shophouses, that you’ll find an equally memorable hotel: Duxton Reserve, a spectacular French-accented boutique hotel with interiors by one of the originators of the boutique-hotel movement, the British designer and hotelier Anouska Hempel.
The Serangoon House
Singapore (Little India)
Named for its location on Little India’s Serangoon Road, Serangoon House Singapore is as pure an Indian colonial fantasy as you’re likely to find outside of the subcontinent itself. The lobby is dazzlingly opulent, decked out in custom-made antique-style furniture and bold, brash colors; the 90 rooms and suites are a touch more modern, but absolutely no less lavish in style.
Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree
Singapore (Mandai Wildlife Reserve)
Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree is a first for the brand in its home city, and unlike anything else in Singapore. Tucked within the Mandai Wildlife Reserve, it’s surrounded by five zoological parks, yet feels worlds away from the urban sprawl. Rooms include striking, pod-like treehouses suspended above the forest floor to allow wildlife to pass undisturbed.
The Vagabond Club
Singapore (Kampong Glam)
There’s much to love about the Jacques Garcia–designed Vagabond Club. That’s partly because this sumptuous 41-room boutique, housed in an Art Deco building, looks like a lot more than a cool place to sleep. The interiors are dark and romantic, channeling the old-world glamour of Garcia’s native Paris as much as the Far-East flair of the neighborhood itself. You’re close to Singapore’s Little India, and it feels like it.
21 Carpenter
Singapore (Clarke Quay)
Opened in 1936 as a remittance house, the landmark structure at 21 Carpenter was where the first generation of Singaporean immigrants sent money home, often accompanied by personal messages. Some of those words and phrases have been laser-cut into the facade that adorns the hotel’s modern annex. It’s just one example of the attention to detail that WOHA Architects brought to the table while transforming the building into a boutique hotel.
The Warehouse Hotel
Singapore (Central Business District)
Singapore’s godown warehouse buildings are a good deal more distinctive than your ordinary disused industrial space — and so Singapore’s Warehouse Hotel comes with a good deal more character than your everyday boutique hotel. Zarch Collaboratives oversaw the meticulous restoration and conversion of these heritage buildings, and designers from Asylum transformed their interior spaces into the hotel you see today.
Raffles Hotel, Singapore
Singapore (Central Business District)
Raffles hotel in Singapore is the stuff of legends. Since opening in 1886, the last Singapore tiger was shot underneath the Bar and Billiards room (1902), the first Singapore sling was mixed at the Long Bar (1915), and Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor called it home. Joseph Conrad, W Somerset Maugham, and Rudyard Kipling lived here too. In short, Raffles embodies all that was glamorous about the Far East in colonial times.
Capella Singapore
Singapore (Sentosa Island)
On thirty acres of manicured Sentosa Island parkland, just across the channel from Singapore proper, sits a stunning building by Foster + Partners, home to the Capella Singapore. Here Foster’s new addition is gracefully married to a historical structure. The result is an arrival that’s classic, calming, with the architectural pleasures slowly unfolding throughout the stay.
Naumi Hotel Singapore
Singapore (Central Business District)
The colonial style reigned in Singapore hotels for quite a long time. But today a new generation of design-conscious boutique hotels is moving in. In the place of what was once the Metropole, a fairly standard budget hotel, the Naumi now stands proudly clad in steel mesh. Inside it’s at once crisp and flamboyant, with clean lines and sober colors livened by brightly-colored design-classic chairs or ornate wallpaper patterns etched into glass.
The Standard, Singapore
Singapore (Orchard)
The Standard Singapore brings a jolt of personality to the Orchard Road hotel scene. Behind its shifting, textured façade, you will find a tongue-in-cheek take on tropical glam: poolside cabanas with a swim-up bar, balloon sculptures on your pillow, and yolk-yellow tiled bathrooms. The vibe is unmistakably lively but the comfort is serious: 143 rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, custom robes, and cheery local snacks in the minibar.
Pan Pacific Orchard
Singapore (Orchard)
Such is the competition, you need to be architecturally spectacular to stand out in Singapore – and that’s exactly what Pan Pacific Orchard manages to do, thanks to its thrilling nature-inspired spaces with themes of Forest, Beach, Garden, and Cloud, along with impressive sustainability credentials. Add in luxury bedrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and every modern convenience you’ll ever need.
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore (Marina Bay)
It sounds odd, but the first thing to mention about the fantastically luxurious Marina Bay Sands is the pool. Spanning the iconic hotel’s three glittering towers, it’s the world’s largest rooftop pool, an impossibly futuristic spectacle that’s as striking to behold by day as after dark, when its infinity-edged surface appears to spill out like a waterfall over the lights of Singapore. As for the rooms, even the most basic is fairly opulent.
Mark Fedeli is the hotel marketing and editorial director for Tablet and Michelin Guide. He’s been with Tablet since 2006, and he thinks you should subscribe to our newsletter.