As private members’ wine club 67 Pall Mall opens its doors in Singapore next month, founder and CEO Grant Ashton shares how he’s mapping out its expansion to the rest of the world
Wine lovers will have more reasons to raise their glasses when 67 Pall Mall Singapore, the first Asian outpost of the renowned London-based private members’ wine club, finally opens its doors on the penthouse level of Shaw Centre in Scotts Road this month. Since the news was announced in 2019, the launch has been pushed back due to the pandemic, from the third quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, and it is now set to open on February 14.
Even though the long-drawn-out pandemic has taken its toll on the F&B industry, with the unpredictability of dining restrictions, founder and CEO Grant Ashton is confident of the Singapore government’s vision of moving towards a new normal of living with Covid-19. “People want to go out, they want to have a drink and a good time, and they want to be with their friends because we’ve been in limbo for so long,” he shares this observation—and how it is similar to what’s happening in London. Furthermore, the Singapore club has been nearly five years in the making since he first started scouting for suitable locations in 2017.
Spread across a 15,000-square-feet space, with a terrace overlooking panoramic views of the Orchard Road shopping belt and beyond, the penthouse was the former home of film mogul Runme Shaw. After Shaw passed away in 1985, the apartment was left empty for 20 years before a spa occupied the space for about a decade. Now that 67 Pall Mall Singapore has made the penthouse its home, “we stripped it back to what it was before”, shares Ashton. “[The interior design] has a kind of 1920s and ’30s Shanghai art-deco feel, very sensual and luxurious. The family gave us access to their archives, and we are using some of the objects such as lamps as accent pieces.”
At the heart of the double-volume space is a temperature- and humidity-controlled wine tower, which will house thousands of bottles from the club’s collection. The wine list at the Singapore club comprises some 5,000 different wines from 42 countries—and 1,000 of them will be available by the glass. “What we are bringing to the party is the broadest selection of wines by country, probably one of the biggest lists here, if not the biggest,” Ashton expounds.