Raffles Hotel Singapore

Raffles Hotel Singapore

You arrive on a circular gravel drive off Beach Road, about 25 minutes by car from Changi, to be met by a turbaned Sikh doorman, a ritual that has outlived the beach itself, since a century of land reclamation has pushed the sea well beyond sight of the hotel’s white colonial facade. Raffles opened in 1887 as a ten-room beachfront hotel run by the Armenian Sarkies brothers, who also ran the Eastern & Oriental in Penang, and the arched, red-roofed main building followed in 1899 to designs by Regent Alfred John Bidwell of Swan & Maclaren. It was gazetted a national monument in 1987, then closed for a two-year restoration led by the designer Alexandra Champalimaud, finished in 2019. There are 115 suites and no standard rooms, including 12 Personality Suites named for past guests such as Elizabeth Taylor and Charlie Chaplin. The building is owned by Qatar’s Katara Hospitality, operated by Accor, and run day to day by managing director Christian Westbeld. Even the entry-level State Room suites in the Bras Basah wing exceed 700 square feet, with a separate parlour and bedroom, and the Champalimaud interiors lean on teak, wicker and Peranakan pattern: original teak floors, hand-carved tables, brass light switches, four-posters, and marble bathrooms with glazed Peranakan-style tiles and freestanding rolltop tubs. The three-storey, skylit Grand Lobby keeps its Victorian columns under a Preciosa chandelier and serves afternoon tea to a live harpist. The serious table is 1887 by André, a 42-seat restaurant that André Chiang opened in the old formal dining room in March 2026, and which entered the Michelin guide that August with two stars, run in the kitchen by chef de cuisine Ben Wang. Around it are Yì by Jereme Leung for Cantonese tasting menus, the Tiffin Room under chef Kuldeep Negi, and Butcher’s Block, where Hawaiian chef Jordan Keao cooks over wood fire, plus a rooftop pool and a spa in the Raffles Arcade using Biologique Recherche and Omorovicza. The experience is split in two, and knowing this is what makes a stay work. The front of house is a public monument: the arcade shops, the photographers on the drive, and the Long Bar, where peanut shells go on the floor under slow wicker fans and the Singapore Sling has been poured since 1915. Behind that, the suite wings and Palm Court garden are closed to non-residents, and life moves along wide verandahs where guests read through the cooler morning and evening hours, with a butler reachable on WhatsApp. The literary history is not window dressing, the hotel still keeps a writer-in-residence programme and the Writers Bar by the entrance mixes cocktails named for past guests, and the overall effect is of an institution that knows exactly what it is and sees no reason to update the script beyond the kitchen. You should not come if you want a skyline view from your bed, a pool scene, contemporary architecture, or the anonymity of a big tower, because Marina Bay Sands is across the road for that, and you will pay a significant premium here for history over square footage of glass. Nor is it for anyone irritated by tour groups at the door, since the public half of the property is busy most of the day. You should come if you like old hotels that are still run properly, if you want one of the best restaurants in the city a corridor from your suite, and if you are the kind of traveller who would happily spend a humid afternoon on a teak verandah with a book and a lime juice, letting the Downtown Core get on without you. The short version: Raffles Hotel Singapore is the 1887 colonial original on Beach Road, restored by Alexandra Champalimaud in 2019, with 115 suites, guest-only verandahs and gardens, the Long Bar where the Singapore Sling began, and André Chiang’s two-Michelin-starred 1887 in the old formal dining room.