Singapore...from colonial to cool

From the air, Singapore looks like a castaway’s paradise. The island state sits within a patchwork of perfectly circular islands scattered in the South China Sea, each haloed with a ring of tropical sand. But as the plane lands, the massive cargo ships lurking in its waters and the forest of skyscrapers become visible. Singapore may be unveiling its own version of the Eden Project at the end of this month, but it’s a city that is determinedly urban.

Money talks in Singapore — a place with reputedly more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world — and its message is: “Make this city shine.” Gone are the days when people could dismiss it as a sterile shopping mall for international air passengers in transit. Today, Singapore is building itself an urban image that comes with a little edge. A new architectural identity is shaping the skyline, defined by structures such as Daniel Libeskind’s Reflections skyscrapers, Foster & Partners’ Supreme Court building and the curvaceous Theatres on the Bay, along with the gargantuan and frankly gaga Marina Bay Sands development.

Marina Bay Sands alone comes with superlatives enough for a country that’s smaller than the Isle of Wight, packing within its 55 storeys the world’s most expensive casino, 2,561 hotel rooms and 14 fine-dining restaurants, one of which is headed up by Austrian celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. This £4 billion creation is crowned by the rooftop SkyPark, housing an infinity pool the length of a football pitch that hovers over the city suspended on the world’s largest public cantilevered platform. And this is just one in a string of new developments reshaping Singapore. Changi Airport, once a bastion of outdated Seventies design, is now home to the kind of hip hotels, hanging gardens and rooftop pools that seduce the stopover traveller into staying put.

But there’s never been less of an excuse for holing up at the airport, especially this month with the opening of Bay South Gardens. This 134-acre green space has been five years in the making and comes with a cloud forest, heritage gardens, some artfully designed lakes and a World Expo-style collection of the planet’s plants. It centres around a group of cooled conservatories and a series of sky-scraping solar “supertrees” supplying the gardens’ rainwater and renewable energy. Opening on June 28, there will be two weekends of floral festivities, concerts, carnivals, an eco fair, garden hikes, movies under the stars and more.

The project is the creation of British-based landscape architects, Grant Associates with another British outfit, Wilkinson Eyre, architects of the gardens' giant biodome conservatories. Wilkinson Eyre's design for what are two of the largest climate-controlled conservatories in the world will create a new architectural centrepiece for Singapore, transporting the climates and plant life of Mediterranean and Cloud Forest regions to tropical Singapore. Their sustainable star attractions include an indoor waterfall, a perpetually flowering meadow and high-level walkways rising above the tree canopy.

Bay South Gardens is a cool green antidote to the heat and shimmer of downtown’s financial district and hotel hub, part of a series of free-entry green spaces planned for the Marina Bay waterfront that go by the collective name Gardens by the Bay. It’s the type of municipally planned regeneration that was seen in Las Vegas some years back: a tourism formula involving big- gun architects, mega-bucks museums and Michelin-starred chefs. Formerly seen as a bit of a culinary backwater by Asian standards, Singapore has recently garnered its gastronomic stars, with most international celebrity chefs worth their sea salt opening outposts here, among them Joel Robuchon, Daniel Boulud, Mario Batali and Guy Savoy, along with local stars such as Ignatius Chan and Justin Quek.

But for all its five-star credentials, street food is what Singapore still does best. Food courts such as Tiong Bahru and Singapore Food Trail, a collection of painted stalls underneath the giant Singapore Flyer (panoramic Ferris wheel) are safe, yet superbly atmospheric places to sample traditional dishes such as chicken rice, oyster omelettes, fish sambal, and wispy “dragon beard” candy.

Around Tiong Bahru market, coffee shops and brunch spots are blossoming, led by local culinary entrepreneurs, while over in Holland Village, the talented Janice Wong serves up taster menus of puddings at the 2am Dessert Bar. Wong also fronts a “laboratory” for chefs to work with unusual local produce — weeds, poisonous flowers — in desserts. Her contemporary Damian D’Silva, founder of cult dining spot Soul Kitchen, is planning a venue focusing on Peranakan food, a blend of Hokkien Chinese and Malay cuisine.

But there’s still more than a little of “old Asia” in Singapore, found in the fragrant herbalist shops of bustling Chinatown, the temples of Little India and in Kampong Glam’s shisha cafés plus, of course, some British colonial charm. One of the brightest new tourist addresses is Hotel Fort Canning, set on the hill where the city was founded, in the grand old British Far East Command headquarters. This design-conscious hotel comes with ground floor rooms opening on to decked terraces strewn with tropical plants; others overlook gardens where 14th- and 19th- century ceramics were unearthed during renovations, now displayed beneath the foyer’s glass floor. Visitors should still make a pilgrimage to the Raffles Hotel bar for a Singapore Sling but when it comes to bedding down, these former barracks really offer a taste of Singapore’s stylish new edge.