![An exclusive look inside Raffles Hotel Singapore](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107391328-17110946731711094671-33816597308-1080pnbcnews.jpg?v=1711094673&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
Few hotels are as synonymous with old world grandeur and colonial architecture because the Raffles Hotel Singapore — the hotel of alternative for the city-state’s visiting elite because it first opened in 1887.
Guests from Rudyard Kipling to Catherine, Princess of Wales have graced its hallways, which like the remainder of the hotel were revamped in 2019 after a two-year restoration rumored to have cost upward of $200 million.
Built upon three hectares near town’s Central Business District, the hotel is itself a tourist attraction. Visitors stop to photograph its ornate façade or to sip a Singapore Sling on the drink’s birthplace, the hotel’s Long Bar.
But half of the hotel is reserved for guests only, said Managing Director Christian Westbeld.
“Essentially the most luxurious element of any stick with us is that you just get a sense, once you enter our premises, that point ticks otherwise,” he told CNBC. “Every thing slows down in our partitions.”
Watch the full video to see more of Raffles Hotel Singapore.