With only 40 butlers to attend 299 rooms — to which they are summoned by the push of discreetly concealed buttons — you'd expect service at St. Regis Singapore, www.stregis.com/singapore, to sometimes show the pressure of busy periods, but not a bit of it. Poised and unflappable, 23-year-old Edwin Chen typifies the type of factotum that has made St. Regis famous. He recently spent two hours pounding the sweltering pavements of downtown Singapore looking for a guest's child (he found her having a stroll with her nanny). Compared to that, getting last-minute theater tickets or timing the service of an in-room meal of several courses is a breeze.
St. Regis makes a big feature of its service quality, and indeed, wherever you look in the hotel there are staff tumbling over themselves to accommodate your every vagary. But then again, you are paying at least $590 a night. That buys you a great location (a stone's throw from Singapore Botanic Gardens and just around the corner from the shopping thoroughfare of Orchard Road), a palatial room kitted out with a Bose sound system and Ploh linens, and a style of luxury exemplified by the airport transfer, in which a limousine pulls right up to the plane. Dining — either at Les Saveurs modern French restaurant or the Yan Ting Cantonese restaurant — is similarly upper class. The extravagantly marbled Remde Spa, meanwhile, doesn't even try to be sensible, plying its guests with chilled champagne and chocolates (saffron, rose and cardamom). I suppose you could walk some of it off, but there are butlers for that sort of thing.