The hotel that helped define a firm and a city

Few buildings carry as much of Singapore's story as Raffles Hotel, and few are as closely bound to our own. When the Sarkies Brothers set out to give their growing hotel a main building worthy of its reputation, the commission came to Swan & Maclaren, and to Regent Alfred John Bidwell, the first professionally trained architect to practise in Singapore in generations. The building he designed, completed in 1899, would become one of the most recognisable addresses in Asia.

The main building replaced the original beach house with something altogether more ambitious: a three-storey expression of colonial elegance, designed with the climate in mind. High ceilings, generous verandahs, and a sense of cool, ordered calm gave the hotel an architecture as memorable as the hospitality within it. It was, for its time, state of the art, among the first buildings in Singapore to be fully fitted with electric lighting and ceiling fans.

The commission did more than produce a landmark. It established Swan & Maclaren as the leading architectural practice in colonial Singapore, the beginning of a body of work that would come to define the city's built heritage. Raffles Hotel has since been gazetted as a National Monument and restored across generations, but its architectural identity remains the one Bidwell set down more than a century ago.

For most firms, a building like Raffles Hotel would be the work of a lifetime. For Swan & Maclaren, it was the work of our earliest years, and it remains part of who we are. To return to it is not to take on a project, but to look after something the firm has carried since the very beginning.