Hotel Roosevelt a darkly stylish addition to Macau skyline
Away from the Cotai Strip and with suites facing city’s horse racing track, newly opened Roosevelt, still incomplete, plays up its modern design – all blacks, greys, bronze and marble
What is it? Looking over the western end of the Macau Jockey Club, and within spitting distance of the waterway separating Taipa from Hengqin Island, the US$2 billion, 12-storey Roosevelt could well be taken for the ultimate grandstand. There are no other hotels in the immediate vicinity, and certainly none in the whole city better suited to accommodating racing aficionados.
Opened at the end of July, the hotel’s cut from a very different cloth to its five-star rivals, with a distinct emphasis on thought-provoking modern design thanks to Iceland-born, Los Angeles-based architect Gulla Jónsdóttir, who redesigned the Hollywood Roosevelt in 2007 and whom press releases refer to as a “Glamazon”.
The property will be complete by the end of the year, but in the meantime – starting with the artificial garden worked into the wall and ceiling of the lobby – this is a hotel that, like its sister property in California, fairly fizzes with entertaining surprises.
What are the rooms like? Even if guests feel the horses are a personal no-no, quite the best of the Roosevelt’s 368 rooms and suites face the racecourse, each with a balcony that puts the “Oh!” in panorama.
There’s no traditional Macau, fortune-favouring red-n-gold décor here, rather ebony-lacquered burnt-wood floors, burnished bronze and carved Italian marble. The walls are black, the curtains grey, and the outside of each guestroom door is engraved with a cat’s eye motif.