The Artyzen Hospitality Group may have been founded in 2013 and its first property, the Artyzen Habitat Dongzhimen Beijing, launched in 2017; but in very short order, the brand now boasts thirteen hotels, two of which have just opened in Shanghai and Singapore, right on time to mark its tenth anniversary.
By any yardstick, it’s a prodigious output, not least because of the group’s penchant for collaborating with blue-chip architects and designers. That, and the willingness of its owner, Pansy Ho, the formidable daughter of casino tycoon Stanley Ho, to support the expansion with seemingly endless injections of cash.
Artyzen New Bund 31 Shanghai and Artyzen Singapore
Artyzen New Bund 31 Shanghai, for instance, is a statuesque tower of shimmering glass and steel set in the New Bund 31 mixed-used development on the edge of the Huangpu River. Here, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office has dressed the high-ceilinged interiors of the public spaces, sweeping outdoor terraces, and 202 rooms in a palette of low-key mod-Chinoiserie by way of shades of blues and greys with copper hues and low-slung blonde timber furniture.
Incredibly, Artyzen New Bund 31 is the group’s eighth property in Shanghai, a city its senior VP, Peter Wynne, describes as the ‘launch pad to leading premium lifestyle experiences in the region’ – to wit, an ever-expanding fleet of serviced apartments, restaurants and bars, and conference centres.
An equally potent sign of the group’s ambitions to be a bona fide heavyweight hospitality player is the debut of Artyzen Singapore, its first hotel outside China.
Located across the road from the newly minted Moshe Safdie-designed Edition Singapore, the 142-room property is a genuine crowdpleaser. Tapping into Singapore’s ongoing love affair with biophilic architecture, local studio Ong&Ong have created a low-rise pile that’s cut out with triple-volumed sky gardens, cool, shaded terraces, and a 25-metre long, rooftop infinity pool with sweeping views clear across Singapore’s north green belt and Malaysia in the hazy distance.
Inside, the Sydney-based interior designer Nic Graham has concocted a confection of mood-lit barrel-vaulted room sets that he’s furnished with Straits Settlement motifs, woven wicker, and dramatic, high-arched doorways inset with mirrors and draped with huge baskets of ferns and tropical greens.
For Artyzen, the two new Shanghai and Singapore hotels – which it’s marketing as ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – are part of a larger goal to lock in the 1.8bn-strong Millennial and Gen Z sectors of the hospitality market. ‘They’ve always been our focus,’ says Wynne unapologetically, ‘and we see Artyzen Singapore as a launch pad to expand our presence into South East Asia.’
For now, Artyzen is keeping its expansion strategy close to its chest, but a to-do list that includes at least five new hotels in the next ten years is not too far-fetched, Wynne already on record that he’d like to see an Artyzen hotel in a key European city such as London or Lisbon.
