Skift Take
Young ex-lawyer Loh Lik Peng is eviscerating Singapore's staid image with some of Asia's most creative, community-minded boutique hotels.
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Founder of the Unlisted Collection hotel group based in Singapore, Loh Lik Peng has been quietly building one of the world's most exciting hotel portfolios over the last 10 years. He's also having a lot of fun doing it, because he knows what it's like not to.
During the late 1990s, “Mr. Loh” was a corporate lawyer overseeing the foreclosure of many Singaporean commercial buildings during the Asian financial crisis. It was depressing and demoralizing, day after day, shutting down businesses and boarding up buildings as if they were a growing cancer spreading throughout his city.
One day Loh came across a particularly interesting building in Singapore’s red light district in Chinatown. It was surrounded by the city’s famous “shophouses”—narrow heritage homes consisting of a business at street level and domicile above—and nobody wanted it. So he decided to buy it himself and convert it into Hotel 1929, even though he had no idea how to actually run a hotel.
Loh followed that with the New Majestic Hotel just down the street, and Wanderlust Hotel in the Little India district. Then he took his show on the road, opening The Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai’s old docklands, and three more boutique hotels in London, including the new One Leicester Street in Chinatown last spring. Sydney is next.
Loh has become the darling of the travel industry by transforming forgotten buildings in underserved neighborhoods into ultra hip hotels with well regarded restaurants and a complete lack of pretense. Although, it wasn't until Town Hall Hotel in London won its first Michelin star that Loh, unassuming and down-to-earth, thought he might have a knack for this hotel thing.
“The fact that we were able to make it work gave me a lot of confidence,” he says in this recent Canon Singapore interview. "After that, I thought ‘wow,’ if I can make this work, I guess we’ve got something to offer.”
In Singapore this past summer, the first thing I noticed upon entering the hotel lobbies was the assortment of vintage barber chairs. Loh collects them. At the 29-room Wanderlust, there’s also a Frank Gehry sofa and Trent Jansen chairs anchoring the raw concrete space.
Upstairs, a different local design firm created each of the guest room floors, like Phunk Studio's minimal
