At Tugu Hotels, Indonesia’s most celebrated collection of boutique properties, the art is not a design choice. It is the entire point. From a newly opened landmark in Jakarta’s Old Town to a Michelin-keyed retreat on Lombok’s quietest shore, these are hotels that ask you to look — really look — at what Indonesia once was, and still is.

Most hotels acquire art after the fact — a curator brought in at the end, filling walls that were always going to be walls. Tugu Hotels works in reverse. The art came first. The buildings came later, built around it. This distinction, seemingly small, changes everything about the experience of staying in one.

The story begins in the 1970s, when a young medical student named Anhar Setjadibrata began travelling across the Indonesian archipelago and found its people discarding centuries-old relics — carvings, bronzes, textiles, portraits — as if they were clutter. He started collecting. He never stopped. Today, that collection is the largest privately owned assemblage of Indonesian fine art and cultural antiquities in the world, and it lives not in a museum but in five extraordinary hotels — each one a destination in itself, each one a different chapter in the story of a civilisation.

Jakarta — The Crown Jewel

The newest addition to the Tugu collection — and arguably its most ambitious — House of Tugu Old Town Jakarta opened in the heart of Kota Tua after fifteen years of meticulous preparation. TIME magazine named it one of the World’s Greatest Places, and walking through its corridors it is not difficult to understand why. This is not a hotel that references history. It is a hotel that contains it.

Set on the banks of Kali Besar in what was once the trading heart of Batavia, the property houses the Peranakan Museum of Jakarta alongside its 25 individually designed suites — no two alike. Thousand-year-old statues stand at the entrance to Jajaghu Restaurant. A giant Chinese dragon arches across a ceiling overhead. Ancient porcelain, ancestral portraits, colonial woodwork, and Majapahit relics coexist in rooms named for the legends who shaped this city: the Sugar Baron Oei Tiong Ham, the colonial coffee traders of Batavia, the Peranakan matriarchs who once ruled their households with quiet authority. Design here is inseparable from narrative. Every object has a provenance, and the staff know it.

The same principle governs the table. At Jajaghu, the hotel’s main restaurant, Asian and Western menus are served beneath the watchful gaze of a 13th-century carved Kertanegara statue — a setting that recently drew the Indian Ambassador to Indonesia into a spontaneous discourse on Jain influence in Majapahit art. Meals here are as much conversation as cuisine. Babah Koffie by Kawisari, the hotel’s colonial-style café, pours beans from Tugu’s own Kawisari plantation in East Java — an estate with a lineage stretching back to 1870, when it supplied coffee to the grand salons of Batavia. Even a morning cup, here, arrives with a story worth knowing.

Bali — Where the Collection Began to Dream

Hotel Tugu Bali sits on the shores of Canggu — one of the island’s most creatively alive neighbourhoods — yet steps inside and the contemporary world falls away entirely. A Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Award winner for multiple consecutive years, most recently in 2025, the hotel is built around one of the most significant private collections of Balinese and Javanese art and antiquities in Southeast Asia. Carved stonework frames garden courtyards. Lotus ponds reflect centuries-old pavilions. Rare ikat textiles and hand-lacquered furniture fill rooms that feel less like accommodation and more like the personal quarters of a collector who has been everywhere and brought everything back.

The Puri Le Mayeur villa — named for the Belgian painter Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès, who made Bali his home in 1932 — is among the most romantic suites in all of Asia, its design a tribute to the island’s enduring power to move artists. But it is after dark that Hotel Tugu Bali truly distinguishes itself. Dining here is theatre. At Bale Puputan, a museum-room housing the last antique treasures of the Puputan War, guests take their place at a grand marble table for the Royal Rajadom dinner — an intimate royal feast conceived in homage to the Balinese kings who chose death over surrender in 1906. At Bale Sutra, a 1706 Kang Xi-period Chinese temple transported from Java and reconstructed on-site, candlelit Peranakan dinners unfold inside a 300-year-old crimson chamber of carved wood and Ming-era porcelain. The Royal Tugudom experience retells the royal expeditions of King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit through theatrical dining: a parade of palace dishes carried through the room in the manner of an imperial procession. And every Thursday evening, IWA Restaurant hosts a cultural performance dinner — live Balinese dance and music in a pavilion built in the spirit of an ancient royal hall, where the food is as considered as the ritual. Dining at Tugu Bali is not an accompaniment to the experience. It is the experience.

Lombok — Art in the Silence

A Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Award winner and the holder of one Michelin Key — a distinction that speaks as much to the quality of the overall experience as to any single element — Hotel Tugu Lombok is among the most quietly extraordinary properties in Indonesia. On a private stretch of Sire Beach, facing the Gili islands with Mount Rinjani rising behind, the hotel brings the same depth of curation as its sister properties to a setting of almost unsettling natural beauty.

The art here exists in deliberate dialogue with the landscape. Antique textiles from Lombok’s weaving traditions hang beside objects from across the archipelago. The Hening Swarga Spa — housed in a century-old open-air temple, cooled by Indian Ocean breezes — offers treatments that feel less like spa services and more like a considered act of restoration; the rooftop of the Hening Swarga temple, open to the night sky and the sound of the Indian Ocean, can be arranged as a private dinner for two. On the water, the hotel’s Naga Mesem boat departs Sire Beach at dawn for a sunrise picnic breakfast aboard — sailing past the Gili islands as Mount Rinjani turns gold behind you. Breakfast, for that matter, can be taken anywhere on the property: by the pool, in the garden, on a bamboo bed on the beach. And when night falls, private dinners on the sand, lit by candles and the sound of the surf, complete a day that requires no itinerary beyond the desire to be fully present. For design-minded travellers who believe that restraint is its own form of mastery, Lombok is the revelation.

East Java — The Heartland of the Collection

To understand Tugu fully, one must come to East Java. It is where the collection began, where Anhar Setjadibrata first walked into villages and saw history being thrown away. Hotel Tugu Malang — a Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Award winner as recently as 2025, and ranked among the 101 Best Hotels in the World — is the original property, and it remains the most theatrically magnificent. Red lacquered chandeliers descend from ceilings painted to resemble aged silk. Carved Majapahit reliefs face colonial-era portraits across rooms that have been accumulating beauty, deliberately and without restraint, for over three decades. At Melati Restaurant, the hotel’s storied main dining room, Indonesian home-cooking recipes sit alongside Peranakan Chinese specialities and Dutch colonial-era dishes — a menu that reads like a history lesson and tastes like one, too. SaigonSan transports guests further still: an Indochina dining room filled with artefacts shipped from Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos — many of them brought to Java aboard the vessel Hiap Eng Moh by the ancestors of Tugu’s own founding family — where Thai and Vietnamese cuisine is served in rooms inspired by Angkor Wat. Every meal at Tugu Malang is set in a different era. The difficulty is choosing which century to dine in.

An hour to the south, Hotel Tugu Blitar — set in the city of Blitar, resting place of Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding president — offers something different but equally rare: intimacy with the colonial past in a setting of real historical weight. Housed in one of the oldest colonial mansions in East Java, the hotel positions itself not as a retreat from history but as a way into it. A private becak journey to Makam Bung Karno, a cycle through the coconut-sugar artisans of Gledug Village, and an evening at The Colony Restaurant — where East Javanese recipes and heritage ingredients compose a menu that speaks of a Java few outsiders ever reach — these are experiences that no amount of interior design alone can manufacture. They require the genuine article, which is precisely what Tugu has always insisted upon.

What unites all five Tugu properties — beyond the antiques, beyond the awards, beyond the critical acclaim — is a conviction that has never wavered since that young medical student first picked up an unwanted relic in a Javanese village half a century ago. That a country is nothing without its roots. That beauty, properly preserved, is a form of argument. And that the best place to make that argument is somewhere a guest can sit with it, sleep with it, wake up to it in the morning, and leave, perhaps, a little differently than they arrived.

tuguhotels.com