Yabu Pushelberg rarely gets to build from the ground up at this scale, and their inaugural collaboration with Raffles produced something genuinely singular: Raffles Sentosa Singapore, which arrived in March 2025 as the city-state's first all-villa resort. Spread across 24 acres of tropical hillside on Sentosa Island, the property gave the Toronto-based studio total authorship — master planning, architecture, landscaping, interiors, furniture design, and art direction all flowing from a single creative intelligence. The result is a coherent world rather than a decorated building. The low-slung villas, finished in warm sand-toned render and articulated with deep vertical fins, step down the canopy edge in terraced formations that keep the surrounding trees in constant view. Inside the 62 private pool villas, that same discipline holds. Coffered ceilings in French oak absorb light rather than reflect it, and the carved hexagonal headboard panels — backlit to glow like lanterns at night — carry a geometry rooted in traditional Southeast Asian craft without reproducing it literally. The main restaurant deploys a checkerboard floor of travertine and deep green marble beneath Mathieu Lehanneur's Vertigo pendants, while hand-painted blush murals of ghostly forest trees soften the formal symmetry. At the entry forecourt, a vast circular water feature cascades at dusk against an amber sky, establishing the sensory register that everything inside then sustains — tropical without being folksy, refined without going cold.

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