Opinion / Step aside Singapore: is Malaysia the real land of crazy rich Asians?

Dec 21 , 2018

The Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur opened with a gala celebration attended by royals and lit up with fireworks. Photos: Cedric Tan

Luxury hotels Four Seasons, The Ruma, W, Banyan Tree and Alila Bangsar all open this year in Kuala Lumpur in a sign of growing optimism in the city

In the summer of 2014, Swiss venture capitalist Michael Roesli checked in to the Mandarin Oriental while visiting his fiancé in Kuala Lumpur for the first time. Surveying his room in one of the city’s top luxury hotels, the disappointment in his voice was palpable.

“I know this is probably the cheapest Mandarin Oriental in the world but I certainly did not expect to see this old and tired room,” he said. “The bits are all falling apart and the design is just severely dated. And with one of the highest room rates in the city, I still had to pay for Wi-fi.”

What Roesli described was once the luxury hospitality symbol of the new Malaysia – a 5-star address next to the gleaming twin towers that have become an icon of its capital city. Over the next 20 years the towers stood their ground in a little-changed landscape.

For a while there was some hype around the KL Sentral strip but developments were muted in a region that was thriving; Bangkok continued to boom despite political coups and Singapore brought its Marina Bay blueprint to life in dramatic fashion.

Bar Trigona at Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur attracts the rich and the thirsty.

Kuala Lumpur is back in the spotlight again. A spate of new developments have opened, from the Sofitel Damansara’s quiet launch last December to the hoopla surrounding Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur’s official opening gala in mid-November this year. The project for Four Seasons Place, the tallest hotel/residential building in Kuala Lumpur at 65 floors, took almost two decades to come to fruition.

David Ban, the reclusive Singaporean tycoon who is a director of Venus Assets Sdb Bhd that owns and developed the Four Seasons Place comprising hotel, service apartments, retail space and luxury residences, spoke about it.

“We acquired the land in 2003 and didn’t make any plans for it until we were quite sure that the time was right. Kuala Lumpur is entering a new age and there is rising demand for something taller and more spectacular, like a hotel and residence of this calibre. As Kuala Lumpur is also a springboard to some of the most beautiful destinations in the region, we are hopeful that tourist arrivals in the city will increase significantly.”