In Shanghai, its French Concession, the old trading quarter run by colonial France, remains a charming low-rise neighborhood of tree-lined avenues.

Here a few small, intimate hotels have opened over the past 18 months. One is the Mansion Hotel, a gracious and spacious 1930s villa.

This was once the clubhouse of Du Yue Sheng, aka ‘Big Ears Du’, one of the city’s wealthiest and most notorious gangsters.

He was a triad king who had his base in the French Concession where he bought houses and police chiefs with equal ease. He lived for many years in the mansion which later became the Donghu Hotel on Donghu Lu, and amongst his many businesses ran a bank which owned the Central Plaza building on Yanan Lu near the Bund. He had a number of wives, many concubines and links into the highest levels of Chinese politics, particularly the Nationalists led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

(You can read the full story of this interesting if not over-savory character in Tales of Old Shanghai which I strongly commend to you.)

In The Mansion hotel the fittings are of that period with rosewood cabinets, Art Nouveau lights and Shanghai-style 1930s winged armchairs.

The Mansion Hotel is about a 20-minute taxi ride from The Bund and a 15-minute drive from The People’s Square in the heart of the city. It is opposite a splendid onion-domed Russian Orthodox Church, now a library, and is close to little boutiques and cafes along Xinle and Shaanxi Roads.

There are 30 bedrooms and have all the modern gizmos which are essential to traveling life. Big flat screen TVs, printers, faxes and scanners are standard fittings in each room.

Each room is also equipped with free Wifi and also offers free broadband access. ‘Big Ears Du’ would have approved. He was ever an excellent communicator.
Source: The Independent on Sunday

The Sanlitun Hotel in the Chaoyang District, Beijing, is nearing completion. It is part of the Sanlitun project which Swire is developing in partnership with Gateway Capital — Swire has an 80% stake in the retail development.

The SanLiTun project is a low-rise mixed commercial scheme comprising 19 buildings, including over 250 retail shops, a multi-function hall, and a 100-room boutique hotel. The boutique hotel will be the first hotel to be fully owned and managed by Swire Properties.

The development is expected to be completed in the first half of next year.

Swire Hotels is a new brand and thus the launch of the hotel in Beijing in June will be of great importance to the group which has its finger in many pies including, of course, Cathay Pacific Airways and Dragon Air.

The hotel has been designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and will have 89 spacious — as in not inexpensive — rooms and 10 suites, all with wooden bathrooms, under-floor heating, a sunken garden with open fireplace. There will also be two spa treatment rooms and a stainless-steel swimming pool.

One wonders what John Swire, the hardy Scot seen in our illustration who started trading with China in 1861 and had offices in Shanghai in 1866 would think of all this. Mark you, he would also have had to cope with the fact that Swire is an anchor bottler for Coca Cola and supplies most of the stuff that is drunk in China.

Yuzi in Chinese means ‘fool’ or ‘fooling yourself’, so the art park Yuzi Paradise near Guilin in southern Guangxi province could simply be called a Fool’s Paradise. Except that it also houses one of the world’s largest modern sculpture gardens and workshops, and a boutique hotel - the Hotel of Modern Art (HOMA). It opened on April Fool’s Day in 2003, seven years after construction first began.

Since then it has hosted 11 International Sculpture Symposia and sponsored some of the world’s top sculptors from 47 countries, who have created over 200 works that make this place an international focal point for modern sculpture.

Yuzi has spectacular desert gardens featuring hundreds of species of cacti, many from Australia and other desert climates.

It also has two high-end hotels:

HOMA Libre is a 46-room luxury boutique hotel and the only Chinese hotel member of the French Relais & Chateaux association.
HOMA Sutra is a 118-room conference oriented hotel.
Both have fully equipped spas and business centers.

If you are staying for a week or more, you can participate in creating your own art-work using the facilities of the atelier and its skilled artisans. You pay for the raw materials and create your own work. Research seems to indicate there is no other hotel in the world that offers this facility.

Yuzi Paradise has another 500 hectares that it can expand into, and there are plans to build a series of caves for a Zen retreat experience of meditation and spa treatments.

This is not an inexpensive hotel with a de luxe twin costing US$320. The hotel has its own Yuzi Paradise website which is quite as remarkable as the hotel. The first illustration shows what part of it looks like. The rest is just as good. The second illustration is a map placing the hotel.

It is not easy being the PR for the French company hotel Accor. They have enough brands ranging from Ibis at the lower end (think high quality inexpensive) to the outright luxury end which is the Sofitel and that is moving up a fraction — not an easy trick — while Accor is positioning Pullman as an upscale hotel somewhere between the first-class hotel Sofitel and Novotel. The group aims to re-define the concept of business accommodation to make Pullman a dedicated place for living and corporate conferences.

At lunch a Novotel executive asked us — two journalists who have been working since there were wolves in Wales — if we had ever heard of Pullman. Ha!

The term Pullman was used to refer to railroad sleeping cars which were run by the Pullman Company (founded by George Pullman) in the United States. As a result (the PR person did not know this which makes one lament for modern education) every Pullman attendant thereafter was named George in his memory.

Indeed, in the splendid scene in the movie The Sting, where the card game is being manipulated on a Pullman, the organizer was the porter, name George. The real name of the actor has Larry Mann. (All of this is known because the writer used to work with one of the co-producers.)

Pullman did not keep up the insistence on staff nomenclature when the trains came to Europe. They were run by the Pullman Company or were lounge cars operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

Specifically, in Great Britain, Pullman refers to the lounge cars operated by the British Pullman Car Company. Of which the most famous example was the Brighton Belle between London and Brighton. Sir Laurence Olivier traveled on it every day. When they dropped kippers from the breakfast menu he wrote in mighty protest. So British Rail closed the line. British Rail was like that in those days.

Gilles Pelisson, the chief executive officer of Accor, undoubtedly knows all this which is why he is the boss. He said, ‘The idea of Pullman is to fill a position in the five-star sector that is left by moving Sofitel higher in the market. We are raising the Sofitel brand’s standards to what is called upper-upscale in Europe, and Pullman will fit into the five-star sector under Sofitel and ahead of Novotel.’

The phrase upper-upscale is, I think, one we can live without. Probably reads better in the original French.

Next year, Gilles Pellison said the Pullman network would have 45 hotels operating in 23 countries in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America. By 2015, the company will have 250 Pullman hotels around the world.

In the Asia Pacific region, the Pullman brand will expand rapidly this year, with openings throughout Thailand and China. Further extensive development is planned throughout the region over the coming years, with an estimate of about 40 hotels in operation by 2010.

Note these are hotels not trains. A true Pullman train needs a smooth and well maintained track to work properly. In parts of Asia these are in short supply.

One idea to set the brand differently to the other competition is that Pullman will provide every client with a personal manager to take care of any problem around the clock. The company said, ‘Honesty and transparency are our testimony. The hotel wants to offer good value for money, so whatever a client pays, they will get double.’

Thus the concierge won’t be like George in The Sting. That George organized bent poker games.

The Langham Yangtze Boutique, Shanghai will be located in the heart of Shanghai’s central business district, a stone’s throw from The People’s Square and adjacent to Nanjing Road.

This is a small luxury hotel originally designed in art deco and neo-classic architecture in the 1930s by architect Li Pan and was once named ‘The Third Largest Hotel in the Far East’. Difficult to see, considering its size, how it could claim the title even then but hotels were never sticklers for the precise truth with such claims.

The renovation will stay true to the art deco style in its renovation so that the hotel can re-open in mid-2008 as Shanghai’s only five-star art deco boutique hotel.

There will be 101 rooms and suites, including Chuan Residences which are directly connected to the signature Chuan Spa. Step out of bed and have a quick spa to start the day. There will be treatments based on traditional Chinese medicine philosophy so you should start the day on the right note.

There will be five restaurants and, for meeting, the rooftop column-free Star Room which will hold 250 persons for meetings. Which makes this a modified MICE hotel. But a MICE hotel with a unique style.

Grand Central Holdings has announced it plans to build or manage 10 to 15 high-end resort hotels on the Chinese mainland over the coming three years.

Mainly they are intended for the fast-growing MICE — Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Events — market.

The company, said total investment might reach one to two billion yuan ($133 million to $266 million).

Annie Du, a business development official with the company said, ‘We have seen a growing demand for this niche market and we wish to bring our resort properties to more scenic places which might include the northern and southern parts of China as well as the Yangtze River delta region.’

She was speaking at the opening ceremony of its first resort and spa property on the Chinese mainland in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, seen in our illustration.

The 45-suites Regalia Resort & Spa, on the waterside of the famous Jin Ji Lake, is a joint project with Sipud, a major commercial real estate developer in Suzhou. The Thai Privilege Spa, a healthcare company which runs spas in Bangkok, Phuket, New York, Dubai, Shanghai, among others, will manage the spa operations at Regalia, company officials said.

By 2009, the company plans to open its second resort property near Suzhou’s Yangcheng Lake.
Source: Shanghai Daily

China World Trade will be in charge of the hotel renovation work of Lakeview Hotel Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, a four-star hotel on Huxin Island. It was opened in 1996 with 302 guest rooms and suites. The hotel will reopen before October 2008. China World Trade will also provide consultancy services to Lakeview Hotel through its first two months after the re-opening.

All this through a newly established subsidiary of China World Trade Corp — CWT Hotel Management.

Raymond Tse, Chief Development Officer of China World Trade said, ‘Leveraging our business clubs and travel services experience, we launched CWT Hotel in August 2007 to focus ourselves as a hotel management services provider.’
Source: China World Trade

The resort, hotel and spa operator Banyan Tree has signed on a new property in Shanghai. Banyan announced that it had secured the management of a new exclusive waterfront boutique hotel on one of the last available waterfront sites along the Shanghai Bund. The hotel is scheduled to open in 2010.

Banyan Tree has recently announced five projects in China, including two new city hotels in Beijing.

Interestingly it already has spa presence in Shanghai at The Westin on the Bund.
Source: ChannelNews Asia

JIA Shanghai has opened. It is part of JIA Boutique Hotels which is run by 28 year-old Singaporean founder and owner Yenn Wong who is shown in our illustration. The first hotel was in Hong Kong in 2005. Why the name JIA? It means home in Mandarin.

JIA Shanghai is on the corner of Nanjing Road and Tai Xing Road in a 1920’s building.

Yenn Wong said, ‘I am excited about introducing the JIA concept in such a great city as Shanghai. We will be expanding further with more new hotel, residence and restaurant projects in Asia soon to be announced.’

Three different designers created the interiors of JIA Shanghai. The rooms and suites were designed by Melbourne-based BURO Architects in association with Hecker Phelan and Guthrie Interiors (HP&G).

The Lobby of the hotel is designed by André Fu of Hong Kong architectural firm AFSO. Design of JIA Shanghai’s Italian restaurant, opening later in the year, is the work of Hong Kong based Darryl Goveas.

The hotel has 55 guestrooms and suites, some with private balconies, which average 45 sq. meters.

The Lobby Lounge exclusively serves JIA residents complimentary continental breakfast, all day soft beverages, afternoon cakes and evening wine daily.

JIA Shanghai also features a Techno gym and a Business Center with two offices and a boardroom with videoconferencing facilities.

JIA Shanghai was developed as a joint venture between Yenn Wong and Hong Kong-based Indonesian businessman John Aryananda.
Source: eTravel Blackboard

Landis Hotels and Resorts, which is headquartered in Taiwan, is now opening up on the mainland and claims it is offering a different choice with ‘a touch of personalised service, even better than home’. The thought occurs that any comparison between a luxury hotel and your home is pretty ludicrous. If I tried calling my wife on the intercom and asked for breakfast in bed. I might get it, but possibly not in the manner intended.

Landis has two brands under its management, full-on luxury which uses the name Landis, and Hotel One, which uses a boutique approach. It has now opened two hotels on the mainland, Hotel One Suzhou and Skyway Landis Shanghai.

Eddie Hsia, general manager of Hotel One Suzhou, said, ‘We are planning to have 30 to 50 hotels within 10 to 15 years. The market potential is tremendous and many new hotels are sprouting up in the country. Both the Hotel One and Skyway Landis Hotel Shanghai are trying to offer the guests a different taste.’

The average decoration costs per room at Hotel One Suzhou is about RMB160,000, which is more expensive than most luxury hotel room decoration expenses. Eddie Hsia said, ‘We mainly target those who know how to lead an elegant life.’

While Hotel One in Suzhou is a boutique hotel that plays to the ‘niche’ market, Skyway Landis Hotel Shanghai is a traditional luxury hotel competing head-on with other well-established brands.

The 52-story hotel is one of the tallest hotels in Shanghai’s Puxi area. In 2005 it was selected by the municipal government as one of the area’s top-10 landmarks.

The general manager André Joulian. said the its main customers are currently from Taiwan, followed by clients from Japan. He said, ‘We are trying to attract more guests from Europe. And it may start from my home country France first.’
Source: China Daily