CROWN Hotel At Orchard is to undergo an $80 million revamp that will replace its facade with a modern glass frontage.
It will also feature a gallery of flagship luxury stores in the league of Louis Vuitton, as it more than doubles the amount of retail space on offer at the hotel.
These stores, which span the basement level to the third floor of the property, will have their own individual ground-floor, street-front access.
All 311 hotel rooms, located on levels five to 11, will also undergo an overhaul.
'We're going to revamp it into a more trendy and upmarket hotel,' said Mr Allen Law, director of the hotel's owner and operator Park Hotel Group.
The revamp will start in January 2009 and is due to be completed in the third quarter of that year.
The timing will roughly coincide with the completion of the Orchard Turn mall and the integrated resort at Marina Bay.
After the revamp, the lobby of the four-star hotel will move from the ground floor to level four of the 11-storey building. And the hotel's basement two will have 100 carpark lots.
The lettable area at the current retail podium will increase from 4,000 sq m to 9,000 sq m.
The group hopes to attract, at the most, seven luxury fashion brands to set up their flagship property at the revamped arcade.
The brands will each have an entrance that spans a height of two floors and their own internal staircases or lifts, said Mr Law.
'We're already in discussions with numerous potential tenants,' he said.
Feedback is that these retailers have been looking for just such a space in Orchard Road, but so far, no developer has been willing to build such large units, he said.
'In our case...we want to fully utilise the prominent frontage that our location can offer.'
Mr Law expects the new retail podium to contribute half of Crown Hotel's earnings, up from the 35 per cent to 40 per cent that is contributed by the existing retail space.
joyceteo@sph.com.sg
