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 上海和平饭店本周新开张。现在住不起了，旧貌换新颜。嘻嘻。 |
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ceo/cfo
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头衔: 海归中将
声望: 院士
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加入时间: 2004/11/05
文章: 12941
海归分: 491633
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Restoration of Shanghai’s parade of landmark buildings – the Bund – passes a key milestone this week as the famed Peace Hotel throws open its doors.
Peace Hotel When it was completed in 1929, tycoon Victor Sassoon’s art deco hotel-residence, known as the Cathay Hotel, was among the most famous properties worldwide. Sassoon lived beneath its green pyramid roof and outfitted rooms with luxurious details like Lalique glass in shaving mirrors. The hotel’s downstairs Jazz Bar set the stage for Shanghai’s jazz age.
But what of the building interior wasn’t destroyed at the hands of the Japanese military during World War II was left to decay under mismanagement by Shanghai’s Communist government in the years that followed. For decades, the Peace Hotel seemed to stand as the cornerstone to mark Shanghai’s unrealized opportunities on the historic Bund, a riverfront of European architecture that marked a bygone era.
Even as the rest of Shanghai was putting on the Ritz – and sprouting skyscrapers across the river – the Peace Hotel remained stuck in a time warp of dismal service and drab interior.
Now, its restoration promises to make up for lost time. Closed since 2007, it is launching a soft opening this week as Fairmont Peace Hotel.
It will feature 270 modernized guest rooms with advertised prices starting around $350, while nine “nation-suites” styled in Indian, American and British themes, plus a new tenth floor presidential suite, will be priced at multiples of that level. A new annex will feature a pool and spa.
Fairmont, backed primarily by Qatar and Saudi owners, runs the hotels world-wide under the Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel nameplates, as well as New York’s Plaza and London’s Savoy.
In Shanghai, the job is to restore hotel operation to the past glory. “It’s not all about the walls and the floors,” said the general manager, Kamal Naamani, who previously ran a Fairmont hotel in Dubai.
But Fairmont Raffles won’t have a free run. The management contract is split 50-50 with the Shanghai government’s Jin Jiang Group, the same state-run firm responsible for years of lackluster service and previous renovations that reviewers said missed the mark.
At a press conference Wednesday, Jin Jiang’s Zheng Shengen sounded more the bureaucrat than hotelier in discussing the Peace’s future “sustainable growth,” strict adherence to instructions from municipal historical experts and management through difficulties in renovation.
In the only financial disclosure about the costs, Jin Jiang International Hotels (Group) Co., a listed group subsidiary, has told investors it spent around $65 million on the renovation works.
With a restored waterfront promenade, the Bund is suddenly crowding with high-end hotels. Switzerland’s Swatch Group recently occupied an adjacent spot with its own hotel. The Peninsula opened just steps away. And the Waldorf-Astoria is putting finishing touches on its renovation of the Shanghai Club further down the Bund, also in partnership with Jin Jiang Group.
The Peace Hotel is the most legendary. And Jin Jiang for years entertained offers to manage the hotel by many of the world’s leading firms.
“We’ve had so much experience restoring heritage hotels, in Canada in particular,” Chris J. Cahill, chief operating officer of Fairmont Raffles Hotels International told The Wall Street Journal, referring to the firm’s work on former railway hotels around the country.
“It’s one thing to have the ability,” Cahill said. “It’s the experience restoring instead of renovating.”
The mandate was to “restore and reinterpret,” Ian Carr, a principal at Hirsch Bedner Associates, said in an April 2009 briefing that offered reporters the first inklings of what was planned with the historic property.
Carr explained how his team spent six to eight months just gathering information about what the hotel originally looked like. They sorted through records Sassoon’s family maintained in the Bahamas where he resettled after the communists took control of Shanghai, parsing files at the architecture firm Palmer & Turner that built the original structure, looking at the Shanghai Municipal archives and even turning pages of 1930s magazines to get a feel for the times.
Aside from as many as 25 layers of paint accumulated over the years, the designers had little inside the hotel to guide them as most fittings were destroyed, looted or repurposed over the years. “There’s hardly anything left of the guestrooms,” Carr said. “There was no furniture, no bathroom faucets.”
Construction was complicated by installations of earlier years: a massive China Telecom undersea trunk line, for instance, lands in Shanghai inside the hotel lobby, and of course had to be hidden. Designers sought to preserve a hotel front desk feel yet accommodate what they expect to be hundreds of tour groups likely to wander in daily for peeks at the lobby’s silver frescos and rediscovered rotunda topped with yellow stain glass.
-– James T. Areddy
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 上海和平饭店本周新开张。现在住不起了，旧貌换新颜。嘻嘻。 -- ceo/cfo - (5041 Byte) 2010-7-29 周四, 04:18 (1546 reads)
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