Hotel description

It’s been a while since a new major luxury hotel opened in Kowloon, the mainland peninsula side of Hong Kong — height restrictions prevented the construction of skyscraper-hotels like the 59-story Langham Place building. Now that they’ve been lifted, however, the path is clear for megahotels in the new Asian idiom, combining office floors, a massive retail space, and hundreds of upmarket rooms and suites, perched high above the city’s rooftops.

With six hundred and sixty-five rooms, it would be a stretch to call Langham Place intimate; there’s more to life than hip little boutiques, though, and hospitality on this scale is something altogether different. Rooms are big and smartly appointed, with LCD televisions, DVD players, IP phones and wireless internet. Bathrooms are marble but modern, all with baths and showers, and every room looks out through full-length windows over views of the city or the harbor.

Business travelers, of course, make up a substantial fraction of the Langham Place’s clientele, and they’re taken care of in high style — meeting rooms come in all shapes and sizes, and a handful of restaurants ensure that midnight-oil-burning executives need never set foot outside the building. But like most new city luxury hotels, Langham Place is equally well suited to leisure travel: the Chuan Spa is of resort quality, and the hotel’s location atop thirteen floors of a shopping center means some of the city’s best shopping is just an elevator ride away.