The Barracks Hotel Sentosa

The Barracks Hotel Sentosa opened on 1 December 2019 with 40 rooms inside two conserved buildings from a British artillery outpost built in 1904, restored by Far East Hospitality after a more than two-year refurbishment. It is one of three hotels the developer built around the same Artillery Avenue heritage compound, alongside Village Hotel Sentosa and The Outpost Hotel.

The place

The hotel occupies two of six conserved colonial buildings on Artillery Avenue, in the Palawan area of Sentosa island, alongside two sister properties from the same Far East Hospitality development — the family-oriented Village Hotel Sentosa and the adults-only Outpost Hotel. The site sits back from Sentosa's beaches but within the same resort enclave, trading beachfront for the buildings' military history.

The concept

Built in 1904 as a British artillery outpost, the six-building compound was announced for conversion in June 2018 and opened as The Barracks Hotel on 1 December 2019 after a refurbishment running more than two years. Architect Laurence Liew of Arc Studio Architecture + Urbanism led the conservation of two of the six buildings into the 40-room hotel, while interior designer Kunio Iwata of KKS International worked, in his own words, from the footprint of the buildings' history rather than overlaying a generic luxury template. Unlike most of Sentosa's larger resort hotels, the buildings were never previously used as a hotel — this is new hospitality use for a site with a genuinely different past, not a renovation or rebrand of an operating property.

Dining & wellness

The remaining four conserved buildings are shared across the wider Barracks/Village Hotel/Outpost Hotel enclave: one operates as an Events Centre, and the others make up a Mess Hall block let to third-party tenants — Japanese restaurant Hidemasa By Hide Yamamoto, Indian restaurant Royal Taj, Eurasian restaurant Quentin's and a 7-Eleven — rather than in-house dining run directly by the hotel.