The former Straits Trading Building on Battery Road — a 1919 Neoclassical structure by Swan & Maclaren, Singapore's oldest surviving architectural practice — gives QT Singapore one of the most architecturally credible addresses in the CBD. The facade's Ionic colonnade, rusticated granite base, and ornate parapet frieze were gazetted for conservation, meaning the hotel's conversion had to work within and around a building that the city had already decided mattered. The result places 94 rooms inside a heritage shell while a contemporary tower rises behind, the rooftop lap pool suspended between the two volumes with the glass canyon of Raffles Place glittering on all sides. Inside, the interiors carry the theatrical irreverence that the QT brand brought from Australia, layered here with colonial-era architectural bones. Rooms are dressed in slate-blue wainscoting framed by elaborate white plasterwork moldings, herringbone parquet underfoot, and fabric headboards set against star-burst mirrored wall sculptures — a collision of Georgian proportions and 21st-century eclecticism that works better than it has any right to. The grandest suites gain illuminated trompe-l'oeil ceiling panels and rose-velvet swag curtains that push the theatricality further still. At street level, the open-kitchen restaurant frames its chefs behind dark steel and brass shelving, the cooking visible from communal timber tables — a transparency that feels deliberately at odds with the building's buttoned-up civic exterior.

Formerly Hotel Telegraph

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