Property billionaire Asok Kumar Hiranandani’s Royal Group of Companies is investing about £110 million ($143 million) to develop its maiden hotel in London as the Singaporean magnate seeks to expand his company’s footprint to tap the global travel boom.
Royal Group bought the former NatWest Bank (formerly Westminster Bank) building on Piccadilly in London’s Mayfair district for £65 million last month. It will spend another £45 million to transform the century-old heritage property into a luxury boutique hotel with 50 suites, Hiranandani, chairman of the Singapore-based company said.
Hiranandani says he had been looking for opportunities in London in the past decade, drawn to the city’s attraction as a travel destination. Tourist arrivals in London increased 10% to 10.4 million in the first half of 2024, after rising 25% to 20.3 million in the whole of 2023, government data showed. “London’s tourist arrivals are growing like crazy,” Hiranandani says in an interview with Forbes Asia.
British architectural firm Ritchie Design Partners is designing the London hotel, which is slated to be completed by the end of 2026. Hiranandani is confident the hotel could charge guests £1,000 pounds a night, similar to the room rates of the nearby Ritz London. The city had attracted other Singapore property tycoons in recent years. Billionaire Kwek Leng Beng’s City Developments bought St. Katharine Docks in 2023, and real estate magnate Chua Thian Poh’s Ho Bee Land acquired The Scalpel office skyscraper the year before.
Work on the London project, which has been earmarked for conservation, will begin even as construction of another Royal Group hotel in Singapore goes into full swing. Dubbed the Casa Mett, the 165-room hotel will rise on a 12,132-square-foot (1,127-square-meter) plot of land along Cuscaden Road, near the Orchard Road shopping precinct. The former site of the Ming Arcade shopping mall was bought by Royal Group in 2022 for S$172 million ($129 million), setting a record price of S$3,125 per square foot per plot ratio. “I paid top dollar for the site because freehold land in Orchard Road is rare,” Hiranandani explains. “This would be a decent investment.”
Royal Group is spending about S$100 million to construct the 13-story Casa Mett hotel, which will have a blade-shaped curving glass facade that will rise to a height of 100 meters. Designed by Singapore-based SCDA Architects, the hotel will feature high-ceiling rooms reaching a height of 4.2 meters, sky terraces on the second and eighth floor and a pool bar on the roof deck.
Slated to open in early 2027, Casa Mett will be managed by Dubai-based Sunset Hospitality Group, better known as an operator of restaurants such as Mott 32 and Sushisamba. Hiranandani says he is confident that the new hotel can charge about S$500 a night, similar to the rates of newly built hotels in the vicinity such as The Edition (part of City Developments) and Artyzen Singapore, which was developed by casino tycoon Pansy Ho’s Shun Tak Holdings.
Despite the proliferation of new hotels in Singapore post-Covid, Hiranandani believes the island nation needs more hotel rooms to accommodate the anticipated increase in inbound travellers once Changi Airport opens Terminal 5 by 2030. The new terminal can handle 50 million passengers a year. Tourist arrivals are expected to increase 12% to 18.5 million in 2025 after rising 21% last year, according to the Singapore Tourism Board.
“The potential of Singapore is quite vast,” Hiranandani says. Royal Group had been expanding its hotel footprint in the Lion City in recent years to tap into the travel boom. Earlier this month, it opened Raffles Sentosa resort, comprising 62 villas. Construction cost for the resort ballooned to S$300 million from an original budget of S$180 million due to delays caused by the pandemic.
Hiranandani is the cofounder of the erstwhile Royal Brothers property group, which was split in 2011 following a family settlement between him and his older brother Raj Kumar—also a billionaire who runs his separate companies, Royal Holdings and RB Capital, with his son Kishin.
Through Royal Group, Hiranandani owns prime Singapore assets including the Sofitel Sentosa Resort and the Royal Group office building at the heart of the Raffles Place central business district. It also owns hotels in Malaysia such as the Double Tree by Hilton in Kuala Lumpur. With a net worth of $1.7 billion, Hiranandani ranked No. 28 on the list of Singapore’s 50 Richest that was published last September.
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