Wink Hotels’ rooms epitomize stripped-back style. Lots of what you do need, nothing of what you don’t. One stand-out feature is revealed when the floor-to-ceiling blind rolls down – a drawing of the hotel’s surroundings by a local artist, Richie Fawcett, who’s been capturing Saigon and beyond in pen and ink for almost a decade.
In the process, Richie has tracked the seismic shifts the fast-growing city has been through and continues to go through. But his relationship to the city doesn’t end there. As a hugely influential bartender who has a claim to kickstarting the city’s cocktail scene, Richie Fawcett has even gone as far as creating epic concoctions based on the city’s streets, compiled in two Cocktail Art of Saigon drinks manuals. “Call me a ‘bartist’ – a bartender-artist – that about covers it,” he laughs from his stool in the studio he’s created in a historic building on Ly Tu Trong.
