A pair of restored 1880s colonial buildings folded into twelve rainforested hectares on Sentosa island.
Twelve hectares of rain-forested grounds separate Capella Singapore from the rest of Sentosa, the resort island off Singapore's southern coast long given over to beach clubs, golf courses, and a certain deliberate remove from the city across the strait.
The hotel opened in 2009, designed by Foster + Partners, who reworked a pair of conserved colonial-era buildings into the heart of the new resort. Those structures — gazetted for conservation and later recognised with a URA Architectural Heritage Award — were built in the 1880s as officers' quarters, with separate blocks originally used as a mess and as family housing overlooking the harbour; their restoration preserved the original verandahs, terracotta-tiled roofs, and proportions of the white-stone buildings, while new construction was set discreetly around them. Foster + Partners' contemporary wings rise to the same height as the historic pair and curve outward from either side in a long serpentine loop, their facades finished in earth-toned balustrades chosen to echo the terracotta of the original roofs, with deep, curved roof overhangs designed to shed Singapore's heavy tropical rainfall, a climate-responsive detail Foster + Partners carried across the new wings as a unifying motif. Inside, the restraint continues: pale timber, stone, and glass predominate over ornament, the hotel's materials chosen to sit quietly alongside the whitewashed walls of the colonial originals rather than compete with them.
Sentosa sits across the narrow Keppel Strait from mainland Singapore, a resort island of man-made beaches, rainforested trails, and Sentosa Golf Club's two championship courses, long host to the SMBC Singapore Open. Monitor lizards and long-tailed macaques still move through its surviving forest patches, a reminder that much of the island was returned to green space well before it became the city's favoured retreat from its own density.
The result holds 112 rooms, suites, villas, and manors in total — Colonial Manors among them, three-bedroom apartments with their own lap pools — arranged in curved lines punctuated by swimming pools that step down through the planting toward the sea, alongside Cassia, a Cantonese fine-dining room, and the Auriga spa.
The loop encloses a central garden, part of more than five thousand trees planted across the site, with winding paths connecting the garden to the beach below as the dense canopy gives way gradually to more open lawn near the shoreline.
Peacocks wander the lawns in the late afternoon, entirely unconcerned with the five-minute walk to the beach.
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