Review of Raffles Hotel, by John Borthwick

In 1987 Singapore's Straits Times lamented with uncharacteristic wryness that "Hotels in the steamier reaches of the Orient aren't what they used to be. All but gone are the grand verandas where plots for novels and more serious misdeeds were hatched over pink gins behind potted palms."

By the 1980's many of Southeast Asia's grand old luxury hotels had fallen into a post-colonial funk, unloved and under-funded by their new masters. The Straits Times went on to regret that in place of "beady-browed sots in white linen suits who conducted colonial and Cold War chicanery long into hot nights laced with whispers of gold, guns, opium and flesh," hotels like Singapore's Raffles were now "occupied mainly by ripe German tourists and shoestring Australians with no visible means of laundering."

The facilities

The dowager empress of Asia's luxury hotels is Singapore's legendary Raffles. The usual literary suspects trailed their solar topees and bar chits through here, starting with Joseph Conrad in 1887, the year of its opening. Thereafter the Raffles' breezeways and ballrooms witnessed an imperial parade of tiger hunting types and literary blow-ins gracing (or occasionally disgracing) its Writers Bar. As well as the ubiquitous Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham (who have suites named after them), other celeb scribblers included Andre Malraux, Pablo Neruda and James A Michener.

The rooms

What happens when a colonial post inevitably goes post-colonial? An extensive makeover in 1991 restored beautifully the Raffles' 103 suites and its famed Billiard Room, Long Bar, Courtyard and Tiffin Room, not to mention her fine "tropical baroque" façade. However, with the addition of an arcade of brand-name boutiques, the Raffles' former aristocratic hauteur seems to have been traded for a sort of self-conscious post-yuppie consumerism. Noel Coward was an irreverent quipper about anything - for instance, "Sunburn is very becoming, but only when it is even. One must be careful to not look like a mixed grill." Impressive as the luxury hotel is, one wonders what Coward might say about the all-starch-and-archways Raffles of today?