1 Beach Road, opened 1 December 1887 with ten rooms, in a shabby seafront bungalow the Sarkies brothers leased from the Arab merchant Syed Mohamed Alsagoff. Four Armenians from Isfahan — Martin, Tigran, Aviet and Arshak — built what was in effect the first hotel chain in Asia, and this was its most consequential house. The name was opportunistic: 1887 was Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, a statue of Stamford Raffles had just been unveiled on the Padang, and Raffles was the fashionable word of the year.
The house
The timing was the business. The Suez Canal had opened in 1869 and steamships had made Asia reachable for European leisure travel for the first time; there was demand and almost no decent accommodation. The Sarkies had already proved the model in Penang with the Eastern of 1884 and the Oriental of 1885, later merged as the Eastern & Oriental, and they came to Singapore when the Penang landlord raised the rent.
Under Tigran the ten-room hostelry became a hotel. Wings went up in 1889–90, the Billiard Room around 1890, the Palm Court Wing around 1894, and the main building opened on 18 November 1899 with 102 rooms and a Grand Marble Dining Salon seating 500 — electric light and electric fans introduced on the opening night, a French chef engaged, and the band of the King’s Own playing through dinner. Architect Regent Alfred John Bidwell.
Arshak died on 9 June 1931 and a bankruptcy petition was filed against the hotel the following day. The family lost control of everything. Raffles survived only because of a long lease on the land, part of the Alsagoff estate, that the brothers had never been able to buy out. Gazetted a national monument on 4 March 1987, on its centenary; restored 1989–91 and again 2017–19. Owned by Qatar’s Katara Hospitality since 2010, operated by Accor.
What distinguishes it
Four brothers built the first hotel chain in Asia. Raffles in Singapore, the Eastern & Oriental in Penang, the Strand in Rangoon, the Crag on Penang Hill, the Sea View, the Majapahit in Surabaya. The Sarkies are not in Part IX and should be.
It opened with ten rooms. A shabby bungalow that had been a boys’ boarding house. The Grand Marble Dining Salon seating 500 came twelve years later.
The name was a marketing decision. Chosen in Victoria’s Jubilee year because a Raffles statue had just been unveiled and the word was fashionable. The most famous hotel name in Asia was picked for topicality.
The lease they could not buy saved the hotel. The Sarkies never managed to purchase the Alsagoff parcels and held them on a long lease instead. When the bankruptcy came in 1931 that lease was the reason the house did not close.
It became a monument at a hundred. Gazetted on 4 March 1987, in its centenary year — the state formally taking custody of a hotel’s meaning.
Raffles has been restored twice in thirty years and is now a very carefully reconstructed version of itself inside a protected shell; a traveller hoping for the unimproved colonial article will not find it. The Long Bar is a scheduled attraction rather than a bar, and the hotel sits in the middle of a business district rather than on the seafront it was built to face — the shoreline has moved.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
Editorial note — The 1 December 1887 opening with ten rooms, the Alsagoff lease, the Sarkies’ Penang hotels of 1884 and 1885, the 18 November 1899 main building with 102 rooms and the 500-seat dining salon, Bidwell as architect, Arshak’s death on 9 June 1931 and the bankruptcy filing, the 4 March 1987 monument designation and Katara ownership from 2010 checked against the National Library Board of Singapore, Roots.gov.sg, famoushotels.org and Wikipedia; verified August 2026. ⚑ Room counts at opening are given as ten and as twenty across sources; the register carries ten, which is the more widely attested.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.