Much like Las Vegas, Macau trades in outré fantasies. Straight laced restraint holds no currency here and, in a way, this might explain why the city was the ideal platform for Zaha Hadid Architects’ otherworldly design for the Morpheus – the highest profile newbie to open in Melco Resorts’ sprawling City of Dreams complex of hotels, restaurants, shops and casino.
Billed as the world’s first free-form high-rise architecture (translated – the geometric grid handily dispenses with internal walls and columns), the 40-storey tower’s internal spaces form a dizzying structural kaleidoscope of voids and atriums.
This physical ‘rubberiness’ has also allowed the architects to fold the interiors around 12 panoramic lifts and two soaring atrium bridges; and Hong Kong-based Remedios Studio to mould the 770 rooms into varying configurations and scale, including six duplex villas lined in black stainless steel and 1000 thread-count cotton sheets, and a 510 sqm penthouse villa which features a central pool around which the living spaces are clustered.
If doing laps in the 40th-storey pool feels too much like being enclosed in a Möbius-esque maze, retreat to one of the two Alain Ducasse restaurants designed by Jouin Manku or, for a macaron-fuelled sugar rush, the Pierre Hermé Lounge.
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