Lone Pine Hotel

OLD TO NEW. Set towards the end of a hotel row along Batu Ferringhi beach, the Lone Pine was a hotel refurbishment project. A rethinking of the five star hotel, it defined the budget boutique hotel.

The original hotel was a jumble of sorts, an accretion of three sets of buildings in all, constructed over a period of about sixty years. The idea was to maintain as much of the original as was possible, laying down cheap terrazzo and cement floors only where required over damaged or unfinished ones and constructing garden walls and screens to modify existing elevations for continuity’s sake.

Internal walls were altered and demolished or built for the modulation of cleaner space but no existing structure was taken down: the life of the hotel, it was felt, resided in the very eclectic ensemble the designers were saddled with. Parts of the original hotel were sufficiently maintained, such that the dignity and effect of time passing was not entirely lost in the translation of old to new.