Saturday September 19, 2009
Antiques aplenty
By PHILIP GAME
One man’s love for antiques has led to the creation of Indonesia’s most imaginative and eclectic hotels and restaurants.
Tibetan thangka (or monastery banners) blend with priceless Chinese figurines and 19th-century European orientalia comprising romantic images of dancing girls and harems.
The restaurant L’Amour Fou — “crazy love” in French — serves seafood, Italian and French cuisine, whilst the Sugar Baron Room re-creates the sumptuous boardroom of Oei Tiong Ham, one of Asia’s richest men during the early years of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the Waroeng Shanghai 1920 Café , which recreates the atmosphere of a simple coffee bar in 1920s’ Batavia (Jakarta), is owned by a Shanghainese–Betawi (Batavian) couple.
This is the Hotel Tugu Malang, one of Indonesia’s most imaginative, most eclectic hotels. The Tugu group owes its genesis to the collecting instincts and creative genius of one avid antiquarian, Anhar Setjadibrata, and no two properties are the same.
Anhar, an Indonesian-Chinese lawyer, began his working life as a travelling salesman for pharmaceutical products when he was forced by circumstances to postpone his plans to practise medicine. He did not then envisage giving up on medicine altogether and taking up the legal profession, let alone becoming one of Indonesia’s most acclaimed hoteliers.
Anhar’s travels across Indonesia in the 70s nurtured in him an appreciation for his country’s much-neglected cultural heritage, and he began to acquire antiques and artefacts, often cast aside by the descendants of the original owners.
The time came eventually when Anhar’s burgeoning collection began to demand a proper home in which it could be shared with the world at large. More to the point, his wife urged him to offload some of the artefacts crowding out their home.
In 1989, Anhar opened the first Tugu Hotel (tugu meaning “monument”), laying the foundation for a collection of exotic, sometimes whimsical, boutique hotels and restaurants extending from Bali across Java to the capital, Jakarta.
Facing an isolated beach at Canggu, outside Kuta, the Tugu Bali is a treasure trove of antiques and old wares assembled from all over Indonesia.
The hotel forms a private walled estate, its lobby housed within the Wantilan Agung or Grand Ceremonial House in which a high-domed timber ceiling soars above a platform enclosed by teakwood columns.
At one end of the platform stands a gigantic Garuda, carved from the local ironwood. Mounted on the columns are spirit masks, intended to favour the benign spirits wafting through on the breeze.
The effect is as much Javanese as Balinese, evoking the audience hall of the Kraton, the palace of the sultans of Yogyakarta. Displayed here is the Cupu Manik, a 16th-century bowl for dispensing holy water which was coveted by Anhar for many years.
Downstairs is a gallery of antiques and handicraft, some not for sale, like the selection of century-old wayang kulit shadow puppets. The showroom resembles a Chinese temple, the columns and bearers salvaged at a time when such things came perilously close to becoming scrap timber — and, on this occasion, hours before fire broke out.
Ornate shop signs inscribed with gilded Chinese characters were also easily acquired in the days when public displays of Chinese language were banned.
Tugu Bali’s Bale Sutra or Palace of Harmony is an elegant dining room evoking the aura of an 18th-century Chinese temple, while another meeting room is decorated with 19th-century Balinese royal antiques and memorabilia.
Two detached villas are named for pioneer European artists Walter Spies and A. J. Le Mayeur, who made their homes in Bali in the 1920s and 30s. Each villa is almost a gallery in its own right, lavishly furnished with period furniture and mementoes evoking the artist and his times.
Le Mayeur married the celebrated Balinese Legong dancer Ni Polok, who lived on until the 1980s, and some of the furnishings in the Puri Le Mayeur villa were acquired directly from her or from a favoured craftsman.
“Most of all I wanted the rooms to capture the spirit of how they lived”, says Anhar.
The upper story of a detached bungalow formed my own room, commanding views out over the property and down to the beach; guests downstairs enjoyed the use of a private plunge pool. Everything modern, such as light switches, is concealed or masked by old world housing, usually in stained wood.
The Waroeng Tugu cooking school demonstrates traditional Javanese and Balinese recipes, emanating exquisite smells as we passed by. Even a traditional barber shop has been recreated, whilst the Waroeng Djamoe Spa, by its very name, asserts a familiarity with the arcane secrets of Javanese herbal medicine.
Enjoying a relatively cool climate, the East Java hill town of Malang, just outside Surabaya, was for decades favoured by Dutch planters and civil servants retiring from the heat of the lowlands.
In Malang, 1930s’ Art Deco still holds sway, and antique dealers abound. The Tugu Hotel here, facing a traffic circle beside the town hall, was Anhar Setjadibrata’s first public showcase for his treasures and is now managed by his US-educated son Michel.
Although it houses one of Indonesia’s largest collections of Javanese, Chinese and Dutch antiques, this property is not just a repository for collectibles — Anhar’s imagination has run riot in creating the opulent décor of the public rooms as well as the 49 guest suites and rooms.
Top of the range is the Apsara Residence, named for one of the heavenly dancers who descended to earth in answer to the prayers of Jayawarman II, the Javanese-born prince who built a powerful kingdom in 8th century Cambodia. Five centuries later, the Apsara dancers were immortalised in thousands of reliefs carved into the stones of the Angkor Wat temple complex.
The Residence includes a private spa and separate dining area.
In Blitar, the town in East Java where Indonesia’s founding president Soekarno was born and now lies buried, remnants of the 14th-century Majapahit Kingdom stand amidst the lush rice paddies. The Hotel Tugu Sri Lestari is quite different again from the group’s other properties.
Here, the style is colonial classic, circa 1850: the former Hotel Centrum is counted amongst the world’s oldest hotels. Fine period pieces are placed here and there but leave clean open spaces in the lobby, dining area and entry to the main suites. Formidable timber panelled doors are crowned with fretworked fanlights. Period news clippings and photographs of Soekarno and his contemporaries enliven the atrium area.
In the nation’s Ibu Kota or capital, the Tugu group operates two strikingly distinctive eating houses.
Lara Djonggrang in Jalan Cik Di Tiro, Jakarta Kota, follows the now familiar Tugu pattern, being richly adorned with Afghan and Syrian art and fabrics. Annete, the scion’s youngest daughter, presides over a restaurant and bar visibly popular with Jakarta’s diplomatic and expatriate communities.
More than a thousand years old, the legend of Lara Djonggrang still resonates today. In the 9th century, the Hindu princess vowed never to accede to the desires of a suitor who had murdered her father. The suitor, Bandung Bondowoso, summoned up an army of demons to fulfil the superhuman task of erecting 1,000 temples in the space of a single night.
Worried that the temples would indeed be completed before sunrise, the princess and her maids tricked the demon army into taking flight just before dawn, leaving 999 temples completed. Bandung Bondowoso, enraged beyond belief, turned Lara Djonggrang into stone so that she might never again love any other.
The gods, however, heard the prayers of the maidens of the kingdom and transported the late king’s loyal daughter to the heavens where finally she found eternal peace. The restaurant’s prize artefact is a larger-than-life statue of the princess ascending heavenwards.
At Lara Djonggrang, the cuisine draws inspiration from the 14th-century court of King Hayam Wuruk, complementing the Babah kitchen specialities of Dapur Babah, Tugu’s other Jakarta restaurant.
Babah cuisine, like its counterparts in Malaysia and Singapore, blends the contributions of Chinese immigrants with their native-born Javanese women.
Dapur Babah is housed in a pair of restored 1940s’ shophouses on Jalan Veteran near Merdeka Square: conveniently close to the Presidential Palace for that distinguished patron, President Susilo Bambang Yudhyono.
o The writer travelled as a guest of the properties mentioned. For more information on Tugu Hotels and Restaurants, visit www.tuguhotels.com
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