Asia's grand, colonial-style hotels are perfect places for dressing up and swanning about

Colonial splendour lives on in Asia's grand hotels, perfect places for dressing ups and swanning about. Anyone for croquet?

Glory days

In a world of identikit hotel rooms, with walls painted 100 exquisitely different shades of white and a catalogue job-lot of furniture, it’s no wonder travellers crave a touch of individuality and maximalism. Hail a return to the days of bespoke hotels that shrieked of colourful heritage and social shenanigans, where dressing up was de rigueur and at any moment there was the sense something thrilling could occur.

In the little museum at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel, on the third storey of its North Bridge Road-facing colonnaded arcade, there’s a gallery of pictures of famous guests, from Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor to Maurice Chevalier and Charlie Chaplin. They are dressed to the nines, as is Noel Coward, quoted as saying he loved “that very English undercurrent of nonsense that was always going on’’.

Nowhere is this sense of spicy goings-on and nostalgia for gentler times writ larger and more accessible than in Asia’s famous piles. We’re talking colonnades and planters’ chairs, gin slings and ceiling fans, fantail palms and muggy heat. The unsullied thing is hard to find, except perhaps in the less-visited reaches of India, but refurbished colonial
hotels still deliver the connection to place and lavish proportions that solidified their reputations in the glory days of empire.

Yet sometimes progress, in the form of total redevelopment, descends into madness. Some construction taipan, for example, pulled down the Repulse Bay Hotel in Hong Kong years ago and built a replica in its place that was identical on the outside, only cleaner, brighter and more rigorously plumbed and electrified. Go figure.

Amangalla at Galle, Sri Lanka
In the fort city of Galle, on Sri Lanka’s southwestern coast, there’s the sense of pitching up in a drawing-room drama. This 17th-century walled enclave has its share of expatriates, (sometimes feuding) hoteliers, chic rental villas and hole-in-the-wall shops where skilled jewellers perform tiny miracles with semi-precious stones.

At the heart of things is Amangalla, a revitalised hotel under the Amanresorts banner. In the chandeliered and fan-cooled Great Hall, a dapper gent plays the piano most evenings and by day this is afternoon-tea territory. There are scones with rhubarb and ginger jam, palm-sugar cakes, crustless smoked salmon sandwiches, tartlets the size of coins and pure Ceylon tea. One just requires a colonial character of the sort played so acutely by Dame Maggie Smith to be in attendance, all gloved and hatted, tinkling the bone china and complaining about the tropics.
Amangalla’s rooms are frosty white and tall-ceilinged, with high beds, polished floors and reproductions of the original furniture. This building was the New Oriental Hotel, opened in 1865
and later acquired by the Ephramus family, whose most colourful member, Nesta Ephramus
Brohier, was born in Room 25. She died in 1995, aged 90, holder of the Dutch Order of
Orange-Nassau and party girl sans pareil.

Amanresorts, with its customary attention to detail, has put together a booklet on the history of the hotel, with extracts from past guests who wrote of leaking roofs during the monsoon, the “hoarse cries of crows in the tamarind trees’’, billiard balls clicking through hot afternoons and geckos licking jam knives on tea trays. The unstoppable Nesta, it seems, took a man in his 20s as her lover while she was in her 60s. Their abode, the Garden House, is now Amangalla’s most sought-after accommodation. amanresorts.com  

Carcosa Seri Negara, Kuala Lumpur
Carcosa Seri Negara feels like an equatorial Claridge’s transplanted to the tropics. Management is fond of referring to it as a country hotel but its location is, in fact, in thoroughly urban Kuala Lumpur, albeit on an estate engulfed by gardens.

There are butlers butlering like London’s finest, and toiletries in the bathroom that smell
of lavender and primroses. Floral fabrics,
over-stuffed sofas and chandeliers suggest a genteel pile in, say, deepest Hertfordshire, and there is indeed an English connection.

More than a century old, Carcosa Seri Negara served as official residence and guesthouse for senior British civil servants and, after Malaysia’s independence in 1957, became the official residence of the British high commissioner. It
has been a hotel since 1989.

Two grand white buildings (one Carcosa, the other Seri Negara) contain just 13 capacious suites, each named for a Malaysian state. Queen Elizabeth II stayed here in 1989 and returned in 1998, taking the Grand Suite, an enormous apartment with an audience hall and balcony large enough to drape the Union Jack and wave to the masses, which must have made Herself feel at home.
It’s not just British revival style at Carcosa Seri Negara as there is abundant use of Langkawi marble and a decor that showcases the best of Malaysian antiques and handicrafts. I take breakfast on Carcosa’s covered and fern-filled veranda, with its tiled floor, swiping ceiling fans and tea served with a Christofle silver sugar pot
and milk jug. Of course, there’s croquet on the lawn, Pimm’s at the bar and a polite afternoon
tea on the terrace. carcosa.com.my

Galle Face, Colombo
The legendary Galle Face Hotel has lorded it over Colombo’s seafront Galle Face Green (a swathe that the colonial Brits liked to refer to as the Hyde Park of Colombo) since 1864. Still the city’s most famous meeting spot, the colonnaded hotel sits in elephantine splendour, haughty and immutable.

But it has recently entered the 21st century with the opening of a five-star Regency Wing featuring 85 gorgeous guestrooms and a very glamorous spa. The “old’’ rooms have been dubbed the Classic Wing and the sea-facing terrace (you head right after crossing the lobby) retains its colonial feel and is quite the place for lime-garnished gin and tonics as the sun slips
into the Indian Ocean.

But (and this is a very big and cautionary but) Galle Face Hotel’s Classic Wing is only for lovers of colonial shabby chic. The service is erratic, there are often noisy wedding parties and soirees held in the gardens and public areas, and rooms are not as well-maintained as they should be.
If you want a trip back to old Ceylon, complete with eccentric plumbing and carbon-paper chits, this is the place for you. Despite its chic extension, Galle Face Hotel is dysfunctioning just fine. www.gallefacehotel.com

Goodwood Park, Singapore
I like the notion of Singapore’s Goodwood Park as Raffles Lite: the colonial hotel you have when you can’t afford the real thing. Opened in 1900 as the German community’s Teutonia Club, Goodwood Park was modelled on Rhineland castles; when World War I erupted it was seized as enemy property and auctioned off.

The new owners obviously had Anglo affectations as they named the club Goodwood Hall after the English residence of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon. By 1929, the Goodwood Park Hotel was born and guests of the ilk of Edward, Duke of Windsor checked in. In the 1960s, Goodwood Park was a fixture on the itineraries of Asia hands. Cliff Richard and Acker Bilk performed in the Arundel room, when the hotel’s liveried cars and wine cellar boasted airconditioning, and brochures proclaimed its bar to be the longest in South-East Asia. Various modernisations and new wings have followed and there is a rambling sense of old and new. In 1989 the hotel’s baronial Grand Tower was gazetted a national monument. goodwoodparkhotel.com

The Imperial, New Delhi
December 12, 1911 was a significant day in New Delhi’s history. King Emperor George V and Queen Empress Mary laid the foundation stones of the new capital in a splendid ceremony.
The event is celebrated in The Imperial’s grandest dining room, the 1911 restaurant, which is laden with history, from its entry hall to a corner dedicated to Rudyard Kipling, an habitue of the hotel. And what a place to frequent. Designed by an associate of New Delhi’s planner, Edwin Lutyens, The Imperial was touted as the “most luxurious hotel in the city’’ when it opened in 1931. It’s a four-storeyed pile with pillared verandas, a parade of king palms, and design references to colonial and Victorian times as well as art deco.

Privately owned by a princely personage, the hotel is a repository for an extraordinary cargo of artwork and antiques, including portraits and hill-station landscapes by Emily Eden, sister of Raj-era governor-general Lord Auckland. There are 231 rooms and 43 suites in four wings; those in the heritage category have the edge, with parquet floors, rich rugs and gleaming teak trimmings.

Set in more than 3ha of gardens off New Delhi’s central Janpath boulevard, the Imperial is an oasis in the teeming capital; beyond that clipped hedge and afternoon tea on the lawn lies 21st-century reality. theimperialindia.com

The Peninsula, Hong Kong
If I were to live in a hotel like a dotty heiress with more money and high-maintenance cats than friends, The Peninsula would be on the shortlist. I once stayed here for 24 hours without stepping outside, just to see what it would be like. I watched Jackie Chan films, ate house-brand chocolate truffles in bed and flounced about the bars, restaurants and arcades of shops. There was a tea tasting (lychee, white peony) at the hotel’s Chinese dining room, Spring Moon, with its decor harking back to the Shanghai of the 1920s; and cocktails at the Philippe Starck-designed Felix on the 28th floor, with views across Hong Kong harbour to the Central district.

Fresh air? That would be found on the sun terrace after a dip in the 18m pool complete with Roman columns and statues. The Peninsula has 300 guestrooms spread across the original 1928 building and within a 1994-built tower. This extension is sacrilege to purists but has been achieved with great style.

If you don’t stay here, at least enjoy a slice of history during high tea in the lobby. An institution since The Peninsula opened, the procession of morsels on Tiffany china is accompanied by classical music played in a high gallery by the dinner-suited Lobby Strings.

There’s an archive of memorabilia on the first floor. It all started with the Kadoorie brothers, Iraqi Jews from Baghdad who sought their fortunes in the Orient. Their plan was to open “the finest hotel east of Suez”. They succeeded in spades and this year we can wish the peerless Pen a happy 80th birthday. peninsula.com

Raffles Hotel, Singapore
Despite a full refurbishment in the 1990s to the stinging-white splendour of its 1920s heyday, Singapore’s number-one landmark retains sufficient colonial atmosphere to summon the
era when chaps wore cream linen suits and ladies slept in the afternoons, tuckered out after all that shouting at the staff.

Raffles has 103 guestrooms, with those in the best category opening on to the frangipani-scented Palm Court where everything madly sprouts, creeps and flowers in the equatorial heat. There is the implicit invitation to saunter therein with veiled pith helmet and butterfly net.

The guestrooms are capsule interpretations of a privileged planter’s residence of the 1920s,
all four-posters, Chinoiserie bowls and jars, and hardwood floors strewn with oriental rugs. One dines from the spiffing curry buffet in the Tiffin Room, avoids the daytrippers on a quest for pink Singapore Slings in the Long Bar and retires to a low-slung chair with a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s Far Eastern Tales.

The recipient of every hotel award worth having, Raffles started in 1887 as a 10-guestroom bungalow, with verandas made for dallying. Joseph Conrad called it “airy as a birdcage’’. You won’t want to fly home. raffleshotel.com

Sofitel Metropole, Hanoi
To celebrate its centenary in 2001, the management of Hanoi’s oldest hotel, the Sofitel Metropole, took steps to preserve the past by publishing a book about the establishment’s vivid history.

The rollcall of guests includes that peripatetic W. Somerset Maugham, who chose the hotel in 1923 as his bolthole to finish The Gentleman in the Parlour. Also in the 1920s, Noel Coward arrived during a curfew and later declared: “We were not allowed out of the hotel as there was a revolution in progress.’’ Journalist Edgar Snow, reviewing the hotel in 1931, reported: “It is all very gay and on Saturday nights, when dancing lasts until 2 o’clock, it even partakes of a breathless abandon.’’

Once a government-designated guesthouse for official visitors and a base for war correspondents, Charlie Chaplin honeymooned here and, in recent times, crews have filmed scenes for The Quiet American (which author Graham Greene worked on at the hotel). Today’s guests may not be driven to the praise of Snow but there’s much to like, despite many renovations and a 1994 addition.

Rooms in the modern building deliver an overlay of grand luxe, techno pizazz and club-floor privileges, but quarters in the creaky old wing are redolent with history and, if one has a fertile imagination, G&T-drinking ghosts. Despite the slight burial of history amid five-star, hotel-chain polish, the Metropole is a satisfyingly grand experience. Pity Chaplin and Greene never got to sleep on a Sofitel MyBed. sofitel.com

BEST OF THE REST
Brunton Boatyard, Fort Cochin, Kerala

Continental Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City

Eastern & Oriental, Penang

Settha Palace, Vientiane

Taj West End, Bangalore

WRITERS IN RESIDENCE
Hotels with even a hint of history to their name like to boast about famous past guests. In days not that long gone, to be a celebrity meant you actually had to achieve something worthwhile and leave a legacy of note. Writers were among the busiest peripatetics and if you swish around the great piles of Asia you’ll discover that voyaging scribes such as Noel Coward and W. Somerset Maugham did a lot of lying down between engagements. Most of this reclining was in grand hotels replete with ceiling fans, plantation shutters, uniformed servants and easy access to gin and ice during those testy times when the muse refused to co-operate.

Many such hotels are gone, sadly, or have been engulfed by tower blocks and ugly-duckling extensions. The Oriental Bangkok’s two-storey Authors’ Residence (left), built in 1876, is an exception of sorts. Its management has taken much care to preserve the wing in a style that summons the ghosts of four writers well associated with tropical adventures: Maugham, Coward, Michener and Conrad.

All have suites named and themed in their honour, and the hotel recently has spent baht by the barrowload refurbishing this delightful riverside annexe surrounded by palmy gardens. While staying in the Maugham Suite, a riot of magenta and gold, I wrote that I wondered if the hectic colour scheme was a homage to the writer’s malarial hallucinations. He was suffering from same when he arrived at The Oriental in 1923 and was almost turned away by a manager who wasn’t fond of “sick guests”. The suite’s shelves include a copy of Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, in which he relived his feverish Bangkok sojourn.

In the hotel’s modern, high-rise River Wing, other famous writers are celebrated, including Barbara Cartland (a room dressed in multiple shades of pink, naturally), John le Carre, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. But these rooms lack the colonial character and cachet of the illustrious quartet of suites in the Authors’ Residence. mandarinoriental.com