QT Singapore

QT Singapore

The four-storey building at 35 Robinson Road went up in 1927, designed by F.G. Lundon of Swan and Maclaren, Singapore’s oldest architectural practice, as the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company building, and for decades the ten most important overseas telegraph cables in the region converged inside it, which is a better origin story than anything else in the Central Business District can claim. It went on to serve as the Cable and Wireless Building and as headquarters of the Telecommunications Authority of Singapore, reopened as Sofitel So Singapore in June 2014, had a short second life as Hotel Telegraph, and closed on 1 April 2024; QT opened in its place on 16 September 2024, keeping the neoclassical facade untouched and gutting the interiors, the Sydney-born brand’s first hotel outside Australia and New Zealand. Lau Pa Sat’s 1894 cast-iron hawker pavilion is next door, Telok Ayer MRT is 300 metres away, and behind the curved stone corner on Boon Tat Street are 134 rooms and suites ranging from 44 to 90 square metres. The building belongs to Charles Tan’s Sunray Singapore and is run by EVT, QT’s Australian parent, with Doron Whaite, a twenty-year EVT veteran, installed as general manager at opening. Interiors are by Nic Graham & Associates working with EVT’s in-house design team, built on saturated colour, woven rattan and a good deal of whimsy, with prints, textures and wallpapers layered floor to ceiling and walls hung with print work by the artist Jill Tran. Categories climb from QT King rooms through double-height Junior Suites and Corner Suites to the 80-square-metre Balcony Suite with its own outdoor lounge and the 90-square-metre Premier Suite, and every room has a large bathroom with a separate walk-in rain shower, an iPad that runs the room, Chromecast and Bose speakers. Sean Connolly, the Australian chef behind Gowings at QT Sydney and Esther at QT Auckland, is creative director of food and beverage, and his Cygnet is a dim, Art Deco-leaning room run as a Manhattan steakhouse, with a Steak Library of Tajima wagyu rump and Riverine rib eye, his duck fat roast potatoes, and two private dining rooms, plus New York cocktails mixed tableside. Upstairs, Rooftop at QT pours cocktails beside a labyrinth-shaped pool, and the front-of-house team, QT’s so-called Directors of Chaos, wear bespoke outfits by Hu Ruixian of Studio HHFZ. This is a city hotel for people who intend to be out, with satay smoke drifting across Boon Tat Street in the evening, Telok Ayer and the shophouse bars of Amoy Street within ten minutes on foot, and Chinatown just beyond. The QT formula, loud, playful, a little camp, reads differently inside a 1927 colonial shell than it does in a Gold Coast tower, and the contrast mostly works because the facade supplies all the restraint and leaves the rooms free to have fun. Even the entry rooms are large by downtown Singapore standards, the beds are serious, and Cygnet is the kind of hotel restaurant locals book on its own merits, with weekday lunches full of finance people from the towers around it. The CBD thins out at weekends, which suits a Friday-to-Monday stay better than you might expect, since the hawker centre and the neighbourhood’s older streets stay busy while the offices go quiet. You should not come if you want heritage served with reverence, the colonnaded hush of a Raffles, Marina Bay views from bed, or a pool you can spend a whole day beside; the rooftop is for an hour before dinner, and anyone who finds design whimsy tiring will be tired by the second morning. You should come if you like a building with a real history and a hotel that does not take itself too seriously inside it, if you would cross the road for chicken rice at breakfast and still want a properly cooked steak at night, and if you plan to spend your days walking the older streets of the city and come back only to change. The short version: A 1927 neoclassical telegraph building on Robinson Road, reopened by Australia’s QT in September 2024 as 134 rooms and suites, with Sean Connolly’s steakhouse downstairs, a rooftop pool, and Lau Pa Sat next door.