Raffles Hotel: Return to Splendor.
How interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud breathed new life into one of the world’s most iconic, historic hotels.
Renowned hospitality-focused interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud has revitalised an array of heritage-rich hotels, restoring to glory New York’s Waldorf Astoria, The Carlyle and The Pierre, Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel Bungalows in Los Angeles, and London’s Dorchester, among others.
The six-year redesign and refurbishment of Singapore’s Raffles Hotel, however, is undoubtedly her pièce de résistance.
Taking afternoon tea with Alexandra in the lobby of Raffles, I asked whether she’d felt tremendous pressure, being tasked with preserving and indeed resuscitating such an iconic hotel.
“I don't know whether I’d describe it as a weight on our shoulders. Personally, it thrills me having this sort of challenge,” she replied. “This is what keeps me going, this is what I enjoy. In fact, this is where one puts into practice all the knowledge one accumulates, everything one has studied, learned and earned.”
The magnificent lobby at Raffles Hotel, Singapore.
In approaching a vast and hugely sensitive project of this sort, Alexandra said, “I have this notion that we are a little bit like social anthropologists; we do our own version of digging, and listening. And we listen very well, quietly, until everyone's tired of talking to us, then we start our work.”
Exploring the history of Raffles, “You get a sense of the ambiance that existed, the fun and games that went on in this hotel over the years,” Alexandra said. “You hear the tales of what happened here and you think, ‘Gosh, I wish I was at that party in the twenties,’ or whatever it was. You think about the notion that there was a cool sea breeze going through this whole place, and that just outside, there were tigers out there once, and there was a beach just across the road.” (Today, the sea is nearly a kilometre away, thanks to land reclamation.)
A sweet suite bedroom.
“There’s just this mass of details you absorb. And then, you start fantasising, you fantasise about how you can make the hotel current, how to add value in different spaces, how to create new spaces,” Alexandra said. “But you need to think about how to make those changes and create those spaces so they feel seamless, as though they've been there forever.”
She and her team went into the project with a great deal of humility, Alexandra said, fully cognizant of the fact that Raffles is a unique jewel. Yes, it’s a luxury hotel, one of the world’s greatest, but more than that, it is emblematic of a country, of a period in history, of a certain sense of equatorial elegance. Now, it’s also the wellspring of a brand, with Accor, the major hotel group that acquired the Raffles name in 2015, enthusiastically building Raffles properties around the world.
The Writer’s Bar at Raffles.
“They must maintain the spirit of this place in the new iterations or the different versions being established elsewhere,” Alexandra counselled. “There are certain things — colour, volume, scale — that make Raffles Raffles. It’s not that you want to create mirror images of Raffles Singapore, but you do want the sensibility to be there. The new hotels should feel like this place and have something of the soul of the original Raffles.”
Alexandra is delighted with the results of her studio’s redesign of Raffles Singapore. She’s proud of the way the suites maintain a classical beauty while possessing all mod cons. “The latest technology's in there, in a clever way, though not too clever so that when you're exhausted with jet lag, you can’t use the damn things or find the light switch,” she said. She’s pleased that the grand lobby — dour and underutilised before the refurb — has regained the social energy and glamour of bygone times.
“Raffles is really the setting for a magical story,” Alexandra said. “I loved learning the story of what it was, and now, we’ll see the story unfold of what it can be.”
