The Murray, Hong Kong, a Niccolo Hotel

Architecture & Design

The Murray occupies a landmark 27-storey structure completed in 1969 as the Murray Building, a government office block designed by British architect Ron Phillips while working within Hong Kong’s Architectural Services Department. The building’s defining architectural feature is its distinctive recessed, diagonal window orientation, engineered specifically to deflect harsh tropical sunlight while framing sweeping views of Victoria Harbour and the adjacent green expanse of Hong Kong Park. The edifice underwent a multi-year conversion directed by Foster + Partners, transforming the former government offices into a 336-room luxury hotel that opened in 2018. The ground-level porte-cochère preserves the mature Chinese banyan tree that anchors the driveway, integrating the building’s modernist concrete structure with the site’s existing urban ecology.

History & Context

Situated at 22 Cotton Tree Drive in Central, the site sits on land developed during the colonial expansion of Victoria City. The original government headquarters served as a bureaucratic engine for British Hong Kong through decades of rapid economic transformation, housing government offices until the end of 2011, when civil-service functions relocated to the newly completed Central Government Complex at Tamar and the Lands Department auctioned the vacated building for redevelopment into a hotel. Today, its hillside position places guests within walking distance of the Peak Tram terminus and the Central-Mid-Levels escalators, widely described as the longest outdoor covered escalator system of its kind, a piece of transit infrastructure that carries commuters up through the Mid-Levels residential district and has become a minor tourist attraction in its own right.

Local Taste & Practical Information

Transit connectivity is anchored by the Tsuen Wan and Island lines at Central MTR Station, a walkable distance down Cotton Tree Drive via pedestrian footbridges. For culinary exploration, guests step out directly into the Central district’s dense grid, offering immediate access to decades-old cha chaan tengs serving milk tea and pineapple buns, alongside Michelin-starred Cantonese dining rooms scattered through the surrounding blocks. The hotel features several distinct restaurants and bars, including Popinjays on the rooftop terrace, offering panoramic perspectives across the financial district skyline and providing a formal, elevated counterpoint to the informal cha chaan teng culture just down the hill. The building’s hilltop position also gives it a quieter street presence than most Central hotels, buffered somewhat from the ground-level traffic density of the financial district’s core blocks despite sitting only minutes from them on foot.

Lore

Ron Phillips’s original design was ahead of its time in a way rarely credited when the building opened. Rather than relying on air conditioning alone to manage Hong Kong’s subtropical heat, he oriented the tower’s windows diagonally and recessed them within a deep grid, a passive design strategy that cut direct solar gain and reduced the building’s cooling load decades before “green building” became a standard phrase in architecture. That approach is part of why the Murray Building was later recognized as a pioneering example of environmentally responsive modernist design in Hong Kong, even though it was conceived first and foremost as a practical government office block rather than an architectural showcase. Foster + Partners’ conversion team deliberately preserved that window geometry rather than replacing it, treating the original passive-cooling strategy as worth carrying into the hotel’s operation rather than discarding for a purely decorative facade.

Economic Context

The Murray Building’s transformation from a government office block into a five-star hotel reflects Central district’s broader shift over the past two decades, as land values climbed and the government relocated many civil-service functions to purpose-built complexes elsewhere in the territory, freeing up prime historic buildings for adaptive reuse rather than demolition. Heritage conservation policy in Hong Kong has increasingly favored this kind of reuse over teardown for graded historic buildings, both for cultural-preservation reasons and because a building’s embodied structure, in this case a robust 1960s concrete frame built to withstand typhoons, can be reused rather than sent to landfill. The conversion preserved the building’s original grid facade and diagonal window geometry largely intact, meaning the hotel’s exterior silhouette today reads close to how it appeared as a government building over half a century ago, even though almost everything behind that facade was rebuilt. Nightly rates typically run HK$2,400 to HK$5,500, and the property has been awarded BEAM Plus Bronze certification for the sustainable adaptive reuse and historic revitalization of the 1969 Murray Building.