Hotel review: St Regis Singapore
This 20-storey hotel, refurbished in 2017, purrs quietly of luxury and grown-up grandeur.
Singapore’s big hotels, like those in Asian megacities such as Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila and Hong Kong, act as important gathering places for residents. These are central venues for power breakfasts, brokering business deals, society fundraisers, major birthdays and weddings.
And so on a Sunday in late 2019 at St Regis Singapore, taking brunch at the conservatory-style Brasserie Les Saveurs on the ground floor, I shouldn‘t really be surprised to run into four local friends, each in a separate party but all catching up with family because it’s the weekend and that’s what you do.
Alice says her flat is too tiny to entertain and she always has brunch at a five-star hotel on non-workdays. Serena is “doing the rounds” of Sunday spreads with her grandma, who funds the weekly treat and is dressed to the nines. Serena says when they have ticked all the top hotels, they’ll just start over. Everyone at the high-ceilinged and extravagantly appointed Brasserie Les Saveurs seems settled in for the long haul. Conversely, hotel guests, like me, can easily be spotted as we’re the ones in casual clothes and, in my case after arriving past midnight from Osaka, with red eyes and hair at right angles.
This 20-storey hotel on Tanglin Rd, with 299 guestrooms and suites, launched in 2008 and was refurbished in 2017, the year Prince Harry dropped by. It continues the tradition of the first St Regis hotel, opened in New York City in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV, who perished in the Titanic disaster in 1912. The brand still seems primarily aimed at US travellers with its emphasis on butler services such as luggage unpacking, clothes pressing and shoe shining for every accommodation category. Soft furnishings include upholstered bedheads and voluminous swagged curtains, and there are window seats just made for reclining with a novel, and looming crystal chandeliers, all so plush as to be old-fashioned, but none of this should deter you.
It feels welcoming, in fact almost a relief, to bed down somewhere where substance trumps style. There are no edgy design conceits, no baffling lighting panels or unsettling colours. There’s also no Nespresso machine in my guestroom, although no doubt a butler would appear like a genie, if summoned, with a perfect ristretto. And then there are the ensuites, most with freestanding bathtub, double basins, massage shower with multiple controls, “self-defogging mirror” and a television. I do feel defogged, or at least de-stressed, in my 19th-floor abode, an oasis of velvet with ”mood lighting modes”, a vertical view of shiny office and residential buildings clustered at geometric angles, carpets so thick you could easily lose solid objects in the tufts, French-style wall mouldings and an ”executive” writing desk.
The hotel purrs quietly of luxury and grown-up grandeur. There are even velvet benches in the elevators. Oh, and guests can opt for airport transfers aboard a fleet of Flying Spur Bentleys. The hotel‘s art collection of more than 70 major pieces features Chinoiserie screens and contemporary Asian artists you may not have heard of but, voila, there’s a Marc Chagall over there or a Pablo Picasso around the silk-wallpapered corner. Guests can opt to join a daily butler-escorted tour of the major artworks, which I highly recommend.
All other five-star must-haves are in evidence across the hotel, too, including a 24-hour fitness centre, outdoor pool fringed with tropical plantings, and an exceptional Remède Spa, which features eucalyptus-scented steam showers and closes at a leisurely 10.30pm. This facility is as popular with locals as guests so I am lucky to get a Sunday booking for a 90-minute warm jade stone massage that leaves me a little too limp to avail myself of the “aqua reflexology footpath”. But I’m up for some shopping as the hotel is at the western end of the Orchard Rd shopping belt and close to Singapore Botanic Gardens; it’s a short taxi ride to the superb National Gallery of Singapore.
Now it‘s time to meet my pal Megan at the clubby Astor Bar, all wood panelling and red leather, for a spot of afternoon jazz. There are four types of bloody mary mixes, cocktails pepped up with chilli and ginger, and the wagyu sliders go down a treat between our circuits of the salon to inspect its collection of original Picasso lithographs. She is not really hungry, however, after her dim sum brunch at Yan Ting on the mezzanine level, featuring a fantastic progression of dumplings, including a mushroom variety with truffles. Sunday snacking in Singapore style? It’s a thing.
More to the story
Fancy a Singapore fling? Travel, like an extramarital affair, seems an almost illicit undertaking these days. What could go wrong? Plenty. What happens if I contract a socially transmitted disease? Welcome to financial ruin.
But there are promising signs on the horizon, especially for Australians hoping, like me, to visit Singapore soon. I have close family members there and while FaceTime calls are welcome, my tiny granddaughter is growing rapidly and my heart is aching. Daily research tips up more questions than answers but here’s what we know for now.
Qantas is accepting bookings between Australian ports and Singapore for fully vaccinated passengers from mid-December; also included in that experimental “Christmas bubble” are Fiji, the US, Japan, UK and Canada. It’s a test pattern of sorts and still depends on overall vaccination rates in Australia (the target is 80 per cent) and falling case numbers (especially in NSW) and whether Singapore revises its regulations in the meantime.
“We need to plan ahead for what is a complex restart process,” says Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce. Passengers will need electronic proof of their vaccination status to satisfy the airline and Singapore protocols, which include evidence of a recent negative Covid test before boarding and prepaid PCR test at Changi airport. Quarantine would no longer be required in Singapore, depending on that PCR result, and Changi airport has a Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) for processing approved passengers.
Once out of the airport, proof of vaccination is required to enter shops, hotels, restaurants and even hawker markets, some of which have caps on numbers. Further PCR tests are required on days three and seven at designated clinics.
The Singapore government SafeTravel website is expected to be updated by late October to include specific advice for Australian travellers. Randomly selecting December dates for Qantas flights in December, the average Sydney-Singapore economy class ticket is $1024 and return (via Brisbane) is $1015, with the proviso of “government and regulatory approval”. Ready, jab, go? But … into quarantine upon return to Australia? Watch this air space.
In the know
The hotel has implemented reduced capacity and hours at some venues, including pool, spa and dining. Guests are required to produce proof of vaccination and follow protocols such as the wearing of face masks. Aggregation sites, including Qantas Hotels, offer average overnight rates of $417 a double.
Susan Kurosawa was a guest of St Regis Singapore.
