This year marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first Amanresort, Amanpuri in Phuket, a hotel that changed the look of luxurious resorts conclusively. Back in the mid-1980s, Dutch Indonesian journalist-turned-publisher-turned-consultant to the hotel industry Adrian Zecha was on the Thai island, searching for a site on which to build a holiday home. Eventually he located a densely wooded promontory just north of Pansea Beach, where the coconut palms had been left to grow wild. But the estate was larger – about 20 acres – than he had in mind. Why not make it a hotel, he thought. Not just an ordinary hotel, an ideal one. There would be no logos, no formal check in procedure, and guests would not be required to sign chits for everything they ordered. Instead of rooms, they would stay in discreet pavilions and villas, where privacy and aesthetics (minimalist Asian ones) were all. And the service would be faultless, indeed almost telepathic in its ability to second-guess your every whim.
‘I want to make very, very clear – I claim no new invention,’ Zecha once said. ‘Little inns have always been around, and they’ve always been the best places to stay. The only thing different we’re doing is making a business out of it by having multiple units.’ For two decades on, there are 18 Amanresorts in a dozen countries from Bhutan to the US, via Cambodia, France and French Polynesia. Not to mention any number of Aman imitators the world over, among them, it has to be said, the properties that go to make up GHM, the hotel management company Zecha chairs.
But there’s no denying we have Zecha and his designers to thank for all sorts of innovations now taken for granted, not least the whole ‘design hotel’ trend. Would the swimming pool at the new Murano Oriental Resort in Marrakech have been tiled in blood red had Amanpuri not opted for an at-the-time extraordinarily radical ‘midnight blue’, so dark it looks black to the untutored eye? Would W Hotels, the ostensibly hip division of the massive Starwood chain (which embraces Westin, Sheraton and St Regis among other brands), whose catchphrase is ‘want to feel the warmth of cool’, have opted for the same pared-down Aman-lite aesthetic, all muted colours, tealights and cubic glass vases of wheatgrass, when it opened its first (of five) in New York in 1998?
It seems now that practically every major hotel brand wants to add some ‘little inns’ to its portfolio, hotels that may be ‘multiple units’ but aspire to feel like one-off stylish boutiques. Witness Marriott’s recent announcement that it would be working with Ian Schrager, the other godfather of the design hotel, to create a new brand ‘of as many as 100 hotels that will combine the personal, intimate, individualised and unique lodging experience… Together Marriott and I have a new vision and plan to radically rethink and catapult the boutique/lifestyle category hotel into the present by capturing the spirit of the times’ – or that’s how Schrager puts it on his website.
Whether the magic of Schrager’s hipper-than-hip haute- bohemian Gramercy Park in New York, in whose décor the artist Julian Schnabel had a hand, will rub off on Marriott remains to be seen. But Marriott, which has more than 2,800 properties in 67 countries, including luxury brands such as Ritz-Carlton and Bulgari, should not be underestimated. Its central London hotel, for example, the Marriott Grosvenor Square, is in many ways a Claridge’s writ small. Like that eminent grande dame, its stylish interiors – lots of monochrome marble and Neisha Crosland wallpapers – were designed by Alexandra Champalimaud, and it too has a Michelin-starred restaurant overseen by Gordon Ramsay in Maze. Not so surprising, then, that when Adrian Zecha was in London last summer to collect a design award, this Marriott was where he stayed.
Marriott – for whom Zecha used to consult in his pre-Aman days – is not the only major US hotel brand to be diversifying in this way. Hyatt already has the Park Hyatt brand, a small chain of 22 properties where the emphasis is on discretion and the kind of luxury about which the term stealth wealth was coined. (Is that an original Gerhard Richter, whose paintings sell for millions, hanging in the lobby of the Chicago branch? Why yes it is.) And there’s a discernible Aman influence evident in the Park Hyatt ethos: its Paris outpost, the Park Hyatt Vendôme was, for instance, designed by Amanresort’s principal architect, Ed Tuttle.
But Park Hyatt is not the only Hyatt ‘diffusion brand’. Last November, an ANdAZ – Urdu for personal style – opened in London in what had been the Great Eastern Hotel near Liverpool Street, the first of a new line of ‘environmentally conscious’ boutique hotels that have, among other laudable but no longer so innovative initiatives, dispensed with reception desks. In some ways it was a response to InterContinental’s Hotel Indigo, a chain of nine hotels in the US, which has a further 47 on the drawing board.
