Zeitgeist or Bust by Guy Salter

Top ► Residing in the heart of Chelsea, London, the exclusive Belmond Cadogan Hotel.

Lucia van de Post

Lucia van der Post was born and educated in South Africa, where she spent the first 20 years of her life. She started her career in journalism writing on interior design matters for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper before joining The Sunday Times and becoming one of the feature writers on the newly-launched Look pages. In 1973 she became the editor and main feature writer on the How To Spend It pages of the weekend section of the Financial Times which she turned into cult Saturday reading. She was the launch editor of its award-winning monthly colour supplement also called How To Spend It which is now a hugely successful part of the weekend FT. She still writes regularly for How To Spend It where she is an associate editor. What these hotels share is that they are rooted in the culture and history of their surroundings. They all have a touch of the theatre. Not for them the dull universality of bland global good taste. Each is utterly, gloriously individual. It was his ability to tap into a romantic notion of the country each hotel is in, their profound connection to the indigenous geography and culture that made Adrian Zecha’s hotels so justly admired and copied. He clearly understood that to make a great hotel takes more than fantastic service, lovely food, comfortable beds, superb showers, beautifully chosen amenities and charming staff – today all those are a given – to create the sort of hotel that people fall in love with, takes something more. It takes a sense of theatre and of drama. A hotel, after all, is not a home, it doesn’t have to cater for us in our more humdrum quotidian lives. It should make life seem more exciting, more thrilling, more dramatic than anything we have at home. We want our eye to be ravished, our souls to be touched. Which is why today design is ever more important. It’s why interior designers are being paid small fortunes to sprinkle their magic over what might otherwise be bland and boring spaces. It’s one of the reasons that in Southeast Asia Bill Bensley has become so famous – in each and every hotel he’s ever had anything to do with he conjures up something fantastical, something so far removed from the average offering that guests are quite literally left lost for words. He brings truckloads of antiques that he’s collected from around the world and uses them to build a narrative, to create something quite unlike anything else at all. Bensley believes, like Zecha, like our own Kit Kemp, that hotels should tell a story. For his latest tented camp, deep in the Cambodian forests, he has imagined the sort of place that King Sihanouk and Jackie Kennedy might have loved – glamorous in a 1960s way, with old-fashioned service, huge tents with verandas and great luxury. This is what our best hotels have understood. Go into The Connaught and you sense immediately that you will be wrapped in a very English kind of comfort. Nothing to frighten the horses, there is a respect for tradition, for a certain level of formality and it’s what brings its loyal punters back and back. At Belmond’s Cadogan, due to open this year, they are building on the self-same sense of Englishness but basing it round the notion of the writers and artists that Chelsea, where it’s based, is so famous for. At Cliveden, one of our great country house hotels, there is the back story of aristocratic romps and fun-filled weekend house parties all of which give it a certain allure that today is backed up with excellent service and with a rigorously English sense of what country house chic is all about. At Chewton Glen, another famous country house hotel, down in Hampshire, the aura of English rural style is expansively deployed, making it a special and unique hotel to stay in. But it is interesting to note that notions of what grand hotels should offer have evolved during the 21st century to meet millennials’ wider concern with ethical and social matters. Millennials mind about their food. They want it organic, grown as close to the kitchen as possible. They want to know that it hasn’t travelled thousands of air miles and that it is in season. Furthermore, they feel a hotel should do more than simply attend to the needs of pampered guests. They want to know that the staff are properly treated, that the local culture is respected and honoured, that the indigenous people are being trained, educated and employed. They want to feel that the hotels where they stay are concerned about preserving the environment around them. They want their soaps and lotions made from pure ingredients, they don’t need their linen or towels changed every day (protect the planet, save water and energy is their motto) – it is a new kind of luxury they are looking for, one that doesn’t destroy, that doesn’t require acres of trees to be chopped down for their delectation, what Bill Bensley calls “minimal intervention”. Grand hotels have a big role to play but as notions of luxury change so too must they evolve. Not only can they give their lucky punters experiences to remember, they can change the lives of those around them.

Guy Salter

Dubbed ‘Mr Luxury’ by the press, Guy Salter OBE MVO is a long-standing specialist retailer and investor. His pro-bono work includes founding London Craft Week, the GREAT Britain Campaign, and 19 years with Walpole, including establishing the Crafted programme in 2007.

Zeitgeist or Bust

by Guy Salter

To remain engaging, brands must be culturally anchored.

Art, culture, luxury, fashion. How natural nowadays to see these bracketed together. At least for those of us who work in luxury. Even arts luminaries wouldn’t look twice, albeit some of the more fastidious with residual distaste at the inclusion of the last two. Just as leading museums home in on fashion, literature, music or gaming to drive visitors, raise profile and stay relevant, especially to new audiences, so brands borrow from contemporary culture (high and, increasingly, low). With an eye on elevating beyond the commercial into something more weighty, worthy and, so the theory goes, impactful. Or, in the case of streetwear, more youthful and edgy. Shopping plus.

If this is no longer the new normal but normal, why too often does it come across as a tad forced, off-key? Just as with ‘experience as the new luxury’, ‘microplastics and the supply chain’ or ‘AI and big data’, it sometimes smacks of a CEO recently back from a conference, whose team has been hastily assembled to fast track some connect-us-with-the-zeitgeist initiative. Tricky to pull off even for the most sure-footed. So how to play the culture card? Especially when something can go from cool to cold in a season. I’m certainly no expert but here are a few observations from the road. Although maybe the first question to pose is whether this interest in things cultural is a passing fad we can and, given how hard it is to do well, should safely ignore? My view is this is no luxury but core to keeping a brand fighting fit and has always been so. When a brand is born, it is naturally of its time and place. Much of which is often bound up in the personability and passions of the founder, often a natural storyteller. Indeed, as an investor, I look for this energy and point of view, as it reflects and resonates, creating traction and cut-through. Dare I say, soul. Critical to creating value.

Zeitgeist or Bust

Guy Salter

Illustration ► Rory Dobner

Walpole

British Luxury