The New Majestic in Singapore’s Chinatown is both playful and practical, and gives a sense of what hotels can be when imaginations run wild.

Text By Nick Walton

My room is not quite what I expected, but that makes exploring it all the more fun. Like an adult I stand, straight faced, until the porter finishes showing me the basics, and then as soon as he’s gone, like a child, I go on my own journey of discovery. For this is not your average hotel room. In the middle of the living room, with pride of place, are two large, stand-alone claw-foot bathtubs – not just one, but a duo – facing a plasma television. Bath time has never seemed so seductive – or democratic.

But this is all par for the course at Singapore’s sassy little New Majestic Hotel. Located in the depths of a Chinatown going through the throws of gentrification, the New Majestic has played its part in reinventing the neighborhood. The view from many of the hotel’s 30 guest rooms looks down on Bukit Pasoh Road, a street that now boasts cocktail bars, Italian restaurants and advertising agencies filled with executives sipping lattes on restored colonial era terraces.

The New Majestic guest experience isn’t just about retaining heritage though- it’s about breaking free from the cookie cutter hotel existence, about putting things where you least expect them, and offering things you least expected. One of the consistent design themes across all guest rooms, for example, is that the lines between bathroom and living spaces are not just grey; they’re invisible! In my room the spacious shower and WC stalls open directly onto the living room.

The bed is above me; in a New York loft style, I have to climb a rather steep ladder up to a bed-sized platform (not for the faint hearted or mildly intoxicated), but once I’m there, I gaze up at white walls where pencil-lined sheep play and prance. My night light downstairs in the “living room/bathroom” comes straight from a ship’s bridge, and seems as if it could send its beam to the moon.

There are many fun experiences to be found throughout the hotel’s rooms and suites, so you’d be forgiven for wanting to check them off like holes at a mini putt course. There’s the room where giant goldfish swim around your bed (not ideal for anyone suffering from ichthyophobia), rooms dressed in merlot red where the bed is suspended above the floor, and rooms which resemble an aquarium more than a hotel suite.

All this imagination came from DP Architects and Colin Seah of the Ministry of Design (not a real ministry of course). They’re the ones that put gaping big viewing portholes in the bottom of the swimming pool so that diners in the restaurant below can see how the water is, and they’re the ones who left half the ceiling of the lobby unfinished – to give that evolutionary effect. Love it or hate it, the New Majestic represents an innovative breed of hotels that’s changing the way people eat, sleep and work when on the road.

As for me, I fall asleep thinking about sheep (naturally) and hoping that I don’t have to get up in the night for a glass of water, and forget where I am.

New Majestic Hotel
Chinatown, Singapore
Tel: +65 6511 4700
www.newmajestichotel.com

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