Mandarin Oriental Singapore

Mandarin Oriental Singapore

The approach is along Raffles Avenue, across the reclaimed ground of Marina Centre, past the spiked domes of the Esplanade theatres and within sight of the Singapore Flyer, to a building the American architect John Portman completed in 1987, fan-shaped in plan as a nod to the group’s emblem, with a theatre-inspired atrium at its centre that still does the work of lobby and stage at once. It opened that year as The Oriental Singapore, was reworked in 2004 by H.L. Lim of LTW Designworks, and closed in March 2023 for a six-month overhaul that brought the room count down from 527 to 510, 42 of them suites, including a new Presidential Suite and the four-bedroom Royal Marina Bay Penthouse across the top two floors, with its own hot tub, chef’s kitchen and table for ten. It is the only Mandarin Oriental in the city, run by Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, which co-owns the building with Marina Centre Holdings. The 2023 interiors are by Jeffrey Wilkes of DesignWilkes, who took his references from the city, not the brand: Peranakan shophouses, the colonial black-and-white houses, Angsana trees. Rooms are keyed to their windows, batik prints and cooler tones on the Marina Bay side, warmer colours facing the sea, botanical prints for the city view. There are ten places to eat and drink, but the reason to book a table is Cherry Garden, a Cantonese dining room for 38 years, relaunched in July 2025 as Cherry Garden by Chef Fei, the Chaoshan-born chef who earned two Michelin stars in Guangzhou and consults for the group’s kitchens in Bangkok, Beijing, Jakarta and Shenzhen, and who took one star in the 2026 Singapore guide for Cantonese cooking with a Teochew bent, served among timber trellises and stone walls modelled on a Chinese courtyard house. Dolce Vita does Italian beside the pool, embu does all-day dining with a children’s buffet and playground, and MO BAR, Morton’s and a cake shop fill out the rest. This is a large, polished city hotel, and it behaves like one: efficient check-ins, a busy atrium, conference guests from Suntec next door, families at breakfast, and a fifth-floor pool that looks straight across the water to Marina Bay Sands, which is where most of the hotel’s quieter hours are spent. The renovation gave Portman’s 1980s bones a cleaner, more cinematic finish without pretending the building is anything other than what it is. The concierge desk is better than it needs to be, with sidecar tours, mangrove kayaking off the east coast and tingkat painting on the list, and the service has the steady, unflustered quality the group is known for across Asia. You should not come if you want a small hotel where the staff learn your name by the second morning, if you dislike conference lanyards in the lift, or if you are hoping for old Singapore; for that, the colonial district is a ten-minute walk away. You should come if you want the bay from your bed and the pool, one of the more serious Cantonese dinners in the city two floors from your room, and a reliable base from which the Esplanade, the Civic District and the hawker centres are all on foot. The short version: A 510-room Marina Bay hotel in a 1987 John Portman building, renovated in 2023 by DesignWilkes, with bay-facing rooms, a fifth-floor pool and a Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant under Chef Fei.