Fairmont Peace Hotel

At the corner where Nanjing Road meets the Bund, a granite tower rises to a steep green pyramid that has marked the Shanghai waterfront since 1929. Victor Sassoon built it as Sassoon House, with offices on the lower floors and the Cathay Hotel above, and it trades now as the Fairmont Peace Hotel.

History

Sassoon was the heir to a Baghdadi Jewish trading family whose business had moved from Bombay to Shanghai, and he invested heavily in the city's property in the 1920s. The Cathay quickly became the most fashionable address in Shanghai. Noël Coward, laid up there with influenza in 1930, wrote Private Lives during his stay. Charlie Chaplin came with Paulette Goddard in 1936.

After 1949 the building passed into state hands. In 1956 it was renamed the Peace Hotel and run together with the older Palace Hotel across Nanjing Road. In 1980 a group of musicians who had played in the city's dance bands before the war formed the Old Jazz Band, and it became a fixture of the hotel's bar.

The hotel closed in 2007 for a restoration that lasted three years. It reopened in 2010 under Fairmont, in time for the Shanghai Expo. The Palace Hotel building on the opposite corner went its own way and became the Swatch Art Peace Hotel.

Architecture and design

The architects were Palmer & Turner, the Hong Kong and Shanghai practice also responsible for the HSBC building and the Custom House further along the Bund. Sassoon House is one of the first Art Deco buildings on the waterfront: a granite façade with strong vertical lines, set on the corner so that it addresses the river and Nanjing Road at once. The copper-clad pyramid at the top, long since turned green, covered Sassoon's own penthouse.

The restoration recovered the Art Deco interiors that had survived decades of state use: ironwork, glass, light fittings and plasterwork in the public rooms, with lost pieces recreated from photographs and records.

Rooms and suites

The Cathay offered suites decorated in the styles of different countries, and the Fairmont revived the idea in its Nine Nations Suites, each furnished after a national style, Chinese, British, Indian and Japanese among them. The Sassoon Presidential Suite occupies the top of the building beneath the pyramid, with views up and down the Huangpu. The standard rooms were rebuilt in an Art Deco manner to match the building, and many face either the river or Nanjing Road.

Dining

The Jazz Bar on the ground floor is the room most visitors come to see, with the Old Jazz Band playing in the evenings among dark wood and period lamps. Dragon Phoenix serves Cantonese and Shanghainese cooking in a dining room overlooking the river. The Cathay Room, on an upper floor, takes the old hotel's name and serves western food with a view across to Pudong.

Weddings and events

The Peace Hall is the hotel's ballroom, an Art Deco room with a sprung dance floor that has hosted dances since the Cathay's early years. It is used for weddings, banquets and receptions, and the hotel has further function rooms for meetings and smaller dinners. Wedding parties often use the Bund itself for photographs before the reception.

Location

The hotel stands at No. 20 Nanjing Road East, where the shopping street meets the river promenade. East Nanjing Road metro station is close by, and the Bund promenade lies directly across the road. On the far bank of the Huangpu stand the towers of Lujiazui. For a luxury hotel in Shanghai with a direct link to the city's interwar years, few addresses are as exact: the doormen open the same revolving doors that Sassoon's guests used, onto the same corner of the Bund.