Gold woven into the carpet, faucets encrusted with gems, exquisite Italian marble flooring and timber parquetry, european art pieces and your own swimming pool with 24 hour butler service. Yep, this is what AUD$30,000 gets you if you’re staying a single night at the Emperor Suite at Empire Hotel and Country Club in the Sultanate of Brunei. Voted consecutively as “the best suite in the world” (not quite sure what that means), this was a fun place to shoot. I could have spent days happily photographing this suite (by the way, this was just the private pool) – though it was a seven day assignment and I had the rest of the property to cover as well. What made it all particularly remarkable to me was that three days earlier I was sleeping in a smoke-filled village hut surrounded by pigs in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Click on the photograph (below) to see more of The Empire.