For seven decades before it received a single hotel guest, the building at the mouth of the Singapore River served as the General Post Office — a Palladian monument completed in 1928 to designs by Major P.H. Keys of the Public Works Department, its colonnaded granite facade carrying the civic authority of empire across the waterfront. The Fullerton Hotel Singapore opened within those walls in January 2001 after a meticulous conservation effort by RSP Architects, which preserved the monumental Doric columns, coffered ceilings, and the building's characteristic chamfered corner massing while threading 400 rooms across eight floors of what had been government offices and sorting halls. The interiors navigate a familiar colonial-revival tension — how much history to invoke, how much to suppress — and largely find a workable answer. Guestrooms are finished in warm taupe wovens, patterned carpets with restrained geometric borders, upholstered headboards set within panelled surrounds detailed in Art Deco-inflected mouldings, and dark mahogany case furniture that gestures toward the building's era without costuming itself as period reproduction. The pool terrace, carved into the building's river-facing plinth beneath a run of granite Corinthian columns, delivers one of Singapore's more architecturally charged outdoor spaces, the historic Cavenagh Bridge framing the western view. Inside the Chinese restaurant, silk lanterns descend through double-height volumes whose original coffered white plasterwork has been left largely intact, the ornamental contrast between colonial structure and Peranakan-inflected decorative detail quietly capturing what the city itself has always been.

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