Singaporean luxury hotel brand Raffles Hotel & Resorts, which has hotels in Dubai, Paris and the Seychelles, is opening its first property in the Western Hemisphere in Boston's Back Bay.
The hotel will be built in a new, 33-story tower at the corner of Stuart Street and Trinity Place by local developers Jordan Warshaw and Gary and Jeffery Saunders, the Boston Globe reports. The $375M, 400-foot tower, on the site of the former John Hancock Hotel & Conference Center, is expected to start construction later this year.
Raffles has a dozen hotels worldwide, but each is tailored to its host city, Warshaw told the Globe.
"We did not want to bring in, for lack of a better word, a cookie-cutter luxury brand," he told the paper. "We wanted something special.”
Raffles was acquired by French hotel company AccorHotels in 2016 and is planning five more hotels around the world, but decided Boston — one of the United States' most-expensive cities and a fast-rising technology giant — was the right spot to launch on the continent. Before Accor bought Raffles, it had operated the L'Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills as a Raffles Hotel, but that property has since changed flags to a Viceroy
The Boston building will be half-condominium, half-hotel, branded as Raffles Boston Back Bay Hotel & Residences, with amenities like 24-hour butler service extended to guests and owners. The development is expected to open in 2021, Warshaw said.
The Singapore Sling, a gin-based cocktail, was invented in a Raffles hotel in the early 20th century.
CORRECTION, APRIL 27, 1:30 P.M. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the headquarters of Paris-based AccorHotels. This story has been updated.
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