For Nostalgia
Travel can be a forward-looking as well as a retrospective exercise. Some people explore ancient ruins to gain a better sense of what the future could hold. In 1967, when she visited Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, Jacqueline Kennedy, who was invited by King Norodom Sihanouk, found the Grand Hotel d’Angkor a restorative sanctuary in which to take stock.
The hotel with origins tracing to 1932 was created in the opulent French colonial style of that era. Its top-to-bottom Art Deco elegance and Chinese decorative features was matched by Alfred Messner’s innovative interpretations of what was then considered experiential luxury travel. As ‘Director of the Grand Hotel’, he captivated a generation of global explorers arriving on steamships with activities like game-hunting on the outskirts of Siem Reap and curated Royal-sanctioned dance performances. Messner’s marketing deftness also featured celebrations at Angkor Wat with “torch-lit dancers” – a precursor to present-day events at the heritage site.
These days, a Warhol-inspired portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy by Siem Reap-based Belgian artist Christian Develter decorates a meeting room beside the hotel lobby. The pop art reference is a poignant contrast to subsequent decades that saw the hotel shutter, the unrest of the 1970s and the 1980s, through to 1997, when it reopened as the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor.
Heritage elements, too, are peppered throughout the property. As the lobby’s centrepiece is the 1932 elevator with original timber finishing and steel door and grills along with an environs that’s as much about the old world as it is about sincerely recreating a sense of time and place. On the cards this year: a total refurbishment of the hotel including its luxurious 119 rooms. What won’t change? The stunning 35-metre swimming pool; a setting that takes a leaf from Angkor’s royal bathing pools of centuries past. Choose a spot in the sun or by the shade to sip the hotel’s signature pour: ‘the Airavata’, a sweet and tangy tropical blend of rum, coconut, passion fruit, lime juice, crème de banana and pineapple.
