Storybook Staycation

Better known for its barefoot luxury properties in far-flung, nature-rich locales, Six Senses breaks new ground with Six Senses Duxton – its first foray into the city centre. Featuring the eclectic touches of legendary Brit designer Anouska Hempel, Singapore’s first Six Senses hotel is a whimsical wonderland worth a night’s stay, or several.

- Justina Tan

We admit: Six Senses Duxton makes us proud to be living in Singapore. With rapid urbanisation and a lack of natural landscapes, our country is quickly losing its soul and places of cultural value are being lost to gentrification.

A much-welcomed entrant on the local hotel scene, Six Senses’ first Singapore property, which opened last month, puts our city-state on the world map for the right reasons. Located in the historical district of Tanjong Pagar, the 49-room hotel sets up shop along a stretch of Duxton Road lined with colonial-era shophouses. Six Senses Duxton was also a hotel – The Duxton Hotel which was later renamed Berjaya Hotel – in its previous life, albeit a tired four-star joint that had seen better days. With the building’s structure already set in place, it may have seemed a cakewalk for acclaimed British interior designer and one-time Bond girl, Anouska Hempel (she’s the creator of Blakes Hotel in London, one of the world’s first luxury boutique hotels), to whip things into shape when she was approached to helm the hotel’s overhaul in 2015. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

“There were a lot of restrictions when it came to design and construction, understandably so since Six Senses Duxton is, first and foremost, a heritage building. Almost everything we did on the façade and interior structure required the approval of the Urban Redevelopment Authority,” shares Hempel. “It was a challenge, especially when you consider the fact that it was a pre-existing hotel and we had to tailor the design to fit the existing structure, as opposed to building and designing the hotel from scratch.”

Living in the past