[imagesource:bookings.com]

Simon Sio grew up in humble surroundings in the heart of Macao, living in an old tenement building directly across from what was then the city’s grandest accommodation, Hotel Central.

Hoping to sneak a peak into the glitzy hotel, and enjoy some respite from the Macao heat – it was one of the few places in the former Portuguese colony with air conditioning – the youngster slipped into the building for a look-see.

But Sio was busted by hotel security, and promptly thrown out. Standing on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat, Sio remembers pointing at the building and swearing he would buy it one day.

Fast forward to 2024 and Sio, now a 65-year-old businessman, recently cut the ribbon to officially reopen the 96-year-old Hotel Central as its new owner.

[image: Hotel Central / Facebook]  

But he didn’t buy the hotel out of spite. Sio says he wanted to restore a piece of Macao’s disappearing history, an issue that’s close to his heart.

Hotel Central, which opened in 1928, became a famous gathering spot for celebrities and diplomats during the next few decades.

The mint-coloured seven-story hotel was Macao’s first structure with an elevator and in 1932, it became the city’s first hotel to have a two-story casino. It was enlarged to eight levels in 1938 and eleven floors in 1942, becoming the city’s highest hotel.

Hotel Central, Macao [image: Hotel Central / Facebook] 

 

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However, during the 1960s, as competition heated up, Hotel Central began to lose its lustre.

“The giant watched me grow up like an elder,” says Sio. “So I had a deep emotional attachment to it. At its peak, it was my idol. As I became older, its decay made my heart uncomfortable.

“Until today, Hotel Central exists as the tallest, largest building on San Ma Lo. I felt that it should embody its power at its fullest potential. So I kept my eye out for opportunities to restore it.”

In the 2000s the hotel’s two owners decided to sell the iconic building and so began a seven-year bidding process to buy it.

But the hotel was a far cry from its previous splendour, and renovating a nearly 100-year-old structure was a difficult task, especially since the additional floors built to Hotel Central in the 1930s and 1940s lacked adequate foundation reinforcements.

To make matters worse, the building and its surrounding region are a cultural heritage site and part of the UNESCO-listed historic centre, so Sio was unable to change or remove some structures to bolster its foundation.

“With nearly 100 years of history, the durability of the cement was limited, and it was clearly long past its prime condition,” says Sio. His team even had to invent a new piling method and tested their design multiple times at a construction site in China before setting out to work on Hotel Central.

“We were the first in Macao to try our method,” says Sio. “When you have no experience, you have to take time for trial and error every step of the way…to stop and come up with solutions when we run into issues, to discuss together how to pivot, before we put in the work.”

The cost of the restoration was approximately 400 million Macanese Pataca (R880 million), while the total investment was around 2.2 billion Macanese Pataca (or about R4.8 billion).

The newly renovated Hotel Central has 114 rooms with a retro interior design inspired by the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

A qipao rental service gives guests a chance to dress up in traditional clothing to match the vibe of the hotel, and an exhibition called “Historical Cultural Corridor” on the ground floor is already open to the public. Still to come is a small shopping mall, which will sit on the first three floors of the hotel, though an opening date hasn’t been set.

The hotel will also house a restaurant, a bakery and a rooftop bar overlooking the skyline of Macao on the top floor.

 

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Sio hopes that Hotel Central will inspire more developers to revitalise Macao’s historical sites and diversify the city’s tourism development beyond its glitzy casino resorts.

“There’s a saying which I tell everyone around me: ‘Money can produce volume, but money cannot reproduce history.’”

[source:cnntravel]