Singapore’s most iconic hotel opens new ultra-luxe resort

The address of Raffles Singapore may be No. 1 Beach Road, but today it has no relationship to sand and sea. That wasn’t always the case. The historic hotel began its life as a private beach house, built in the 1830s in what was the fashionable seaside European quarter of the then British colony.

Land reclamation in front of it in the 1840s pushed the seaside away and the quarter was no longer so fashionable. Residences became hotels, No.1 Beach Road among them. The rest, as they say, is history, and Raffles Singapore is now one of the best known and most venerated hotels in the world.

The Raffles brand has been expanding globally in recent years and now, that expansion has looped back on itself with the opening of Raffles Sentosa Singapore on Sentosa Island.

For the property’s general manager, Cavaliere Giovanni Viterale, it’s a homecoming in more ways than one.

“The original property was on the beautiful beachfront,” says Viterale. “Now this property here in Sentosa is just a few steps down to go to the beach, and the beach is fabulous. You have the white sands. It’s tranquil, and it makes you feel really that you are somewhere that you don’t need to leave.”

Sentosa is an island off Singapore’s south coast that’s easily accessible from the CBD. In the past 15 years, spurred on by the opening of the mammoth Resorts World Sentosa, the sleepy green space has undergone a transformation. It’s still all about leisure, there’s still plenty of green space, but there are also hotels, beach clubs and now, Singapore’s first all-villa property in Raffles.