Parkroyal Collection Pickering, Singapore

Parkroyal Collection Pickering, Singapore

You arrive at Parkroyal Collection Pickering on foot more often than by car. Chinatown MRT is a two-minute walk, and Upper Pickering Street runs between the shophouses of Chinatown and the office towers of the Central Business District, with Hong Lim Park, home of Speakers’ Corner, directly opposite. WOHA, the Singapore practice founded by Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell, drew the first plans in December 2007 and designed the building as an extension of that park. Three slim towers of blue and green glass rise from a contoured podium modelled on rock formations, the glass chosen to echo the Singapore River a few streets away, and roughly 15,000 square metres of sky gardens are stacked up the facade. Construction began in December 2009, and the hotel opened in January 2013 as Parkroyal on Pickering. It took its current name in January 2020. There are 367 rooms and suites spread across the sixth to fifteenth floors. The building is owned by UOL Group and run by Pan Pacific Hotels Group, which treats it as the flagship of the Parkroyal Collection line. Inside, the materials are timber, stone and water features, and the rooms start at 28 to 32 square metres. The better ones look into the four-storey sky gardens, where the planting comes right up to the glass, and several have deep tubs set by the window. The fifth floor is given over to the wellness facilities: an infinity pool lined with cabanas shaped like birdcages, a 300-metre garden walk, a St. Gregory spa, a gym and a hot tub. Lime, on the ground floor, is the hotel’s one restaurant. It is built around open kitchens and covers local, Southeast Asian and international dishes from breakfast through dinner, with Lime Bar and a poolside bar alongside it and a rooftop urban farm above. The building holds Green Mark Platinum, Singapore’s highest environmental certification, and runs on solar cells, motion sensors and harvested rainwater. It won Design of the Year at the 2013 President’s Design Award and now holds one Michelin Key. This is a large city hotel that happens to be one of the most important buildings in Singapore of the last fifteen years, and that is the honest order of things. The architecture is the reason to stay. Swimming along the edge of the fifth floor with planting overhead and office lights coming on across the park is something no other hotel in the city quite replicates. The service is efficient and well drilled in the Pan Pacific manner, and the corridors move at a corporate pace on weekdays. It suits architecture-minded travellers, first-time visitors who want Chinatown, Telok Ayer and Boat Quay within walking distance, and anyone who would rather eat at a hawker stall than at the hotel table. You should not come if you want a small hotel, a staff who learn your name by the second morning, or a restaurant worth building an evening around, because Lime is a capable hotel dining room and nothing more. The ballrooms bring conference groups, and the pool fills on weekend afternoons. You should come if a building that rewards close attention matters more to you than intimacy, and if you plan to spend your days walking the old streets of Chinatown and coming back to a garden fourteen floors up. The short version: A 367-room garden tower by WOHA, opened in 2013 on the edge of Chinatown, owned by UOL Group and run by Pan Pacific Hotels Group, with 15,000 square metres of sky gardens and a fifth-floor infinity pool.