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Tag: hotel

The Latest Hotels: Westin, Banyan Tree & Shangri-La

On the spot LuxuryActivist -

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St Regis Rome unveils its Couture Suite designed by The Gallery at HBA London

More big names flock to the promise of China, as Four Seasons debut in Beijing, Banyan Tree launch in Shanghai, Shangri-La in Changzhou & Anantara on Hainan Island

If the past month is anything to go by, luxury hotels look set to replace luxury goods brands and suppliers as the next big thing in our industry’s M&A space.

In the past few weeks alone, Orient-Express Hotels rejected a $1.86 billion unsolicited takeover bid from an arm of the Tata Group of India, as it emerged that Four Seasons Hotel New York owner, H. Ty Warner, had received a bid for his 368-room luxury hotel in midtown Manhattan for about $900 million from an unidentified Asian buyer (Bloomberg).

The unsolicited bidder is allegedly affiliated with the government of Brunei, the kingdom located on the island of Borneo. Interestingly enough, it is the Brunei Investment Agency who now owns luxury hotel manager Dorchester Collection, which includes the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles and the Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills.

This follows the sale of the controlling stake in New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel to India’s Sahara Group, the Setai Fifth Avenue Hotel to Hong Kong’s Great Eagle, Palazzo Versace Australia to a consortium of Chinese investors and Florence’s Grand Hotel Baglioni to Qatar Sovereign Fund. And this is just in the past few months.

As consumers demonstrate a preference towards ‘experiencing’ luxury rather than simply ‘owning’ luxury, one expects that investment interest in luxury hotels will continue.

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Four Seasons, Beijing

Four Seasons Hotels has launched in Beijing, China, with a 313-room property that includes 66 luxury suites. Marrying Chinese influences and contemporary style, the hotel features a range of Western and Chinese artwork, throughout F&B outlets, the fitness centre, an executive lounge, event spaces and a spa inspired by the architecture of traditional Chinese tea gardens.

Website & Source: fourseasons.com/Beijing

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Shangri-La, Changzhou

Shangri-La International Hotel Management, in collaboration with Qiaoyu Group, have debuted the Shangri-La Hotel in Changzhou, in one of China’s top business cities. The 350 guestrooms and suites range from 45 to 225sqm, all featuring floor-to-ceiling windows with unobstructed views of Lake Xihu or the city. The 4000sqm heath club is the largest in Changzhou, encompassing a fully equipped fitness centre, an indoor swimming pool and a spa.

Website: shangri-la.com/changzhou
Souce: HSyndicate

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Anantara, Hainan Island

Anantara has arrived on Hainan Island with the launch of its Sanya Resort & Spa, inspired by oriental and Thai design. The property comprises of 122 rooms, suites and private pool villas, alongside four distinctive restaurants and bars. Spa Pool Villas face the ocean and offer a splendid 500sqm of living space, where guests benefit from the service of a personal Villa host.

Website: sanya.anantara.com
Source: Breaking Travel News

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Majestic Hotel, Kuala Lumpur

The historic Majestic Hotel is set to reopen its doors in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, following an $82.5 million restoration program. The 300-room hotel, owned by YTL Hotels, was built in 1932 and previously housed the country’s National Art Gallery. The restored hotel will become the only Kuala Lumpur based member of The Leading Hotels of The World (LHW) group.

Website: majestickl.com
Source: Luxuo

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Hilton Munich Park, Munich

The 484-room Hilton Munich Park has been re-imagined by JOI-Design, to reflect a style that draws upon its idyllic setting along the banks of the Eisbach Creek. Communal spaces feature laser-cut motifs of branches and birds, Tivoli oak wall panels and backlit glass sheets, whilst suites have been outfitted in warm earth and ripe berry tones.

Website: hilton.com/munich
Source: JOI-Design

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Outrigger, Phi Phi Island

Outrigger has officially debuted its Phi Phi Island Resort and Spa, following a yearlong refurbishment of the former Phi Phi Island Village Beach Resort. 44 new Deluxe Garden Bungalows have been added, each featuring contemporary design with Thai touches, walk-in wardrobes, flat screen televisions, and iPod/iPhone docking stations. Food and beverage venues have been enhanced, and the gym has been improved.

Website: outrigger.com/phi-phi
Source: Hospitality.net

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Westin Grand Central, New York

Starwood Hotels & Resorts has unveiled The Westin New York Grand Central, following a $75 million renovation of the former New York Helmsley Hotel. The brand’s second Manhattan hotel features a complete redesign of the hotel’s interior including 774 spacious guest rooms equipped with Westin’s signature amenities, such as energy-conserving LED and CFL lights, water conserving low flow plumbing and its ‘Heavenly Bed’.

Website: starwoodhotels.com/westin
Source: Luxury Travel Magazine

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Hotel Maria Cristina, San Sebastian

Hotel Maria Cristina, a Luxury Collection Hotel in San Sebastian, has reopened its doors following an extensive $25 million, nine-month restoration. 107 luxurious guestrooms and 29 suites were re-imagined by The Gallery at HBA London, dressed in a pastel palette inspired by the fresh spring tints of macaron patisseries, with plush tufted headboards framed in curvaceous mouldings.

Website: starwoodhotels.com/espagne
Source: HBA London

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Banyan Tree, Shanghai

Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts has debuted its urban resort concept in Shanghai, On The Bund. Each of the guestrooms and suites feature an Expediency Box for pick-up and delivery of polished shoes, laundry and dry-cleaning, as well as six different pillow choices and rooms that are refreshed with a different therapeutic scent each day.

Website: banyantree.com/shanghai
Source: HSyndicate

For more in the series of The Latest Hotels, please see our most recent editions as follows:

- The Latest Hotels: Delano, Four Seasons & Kempinski
- The Latest Hotels: Jaipur, Casablanca & Vienna
- The Latest Hotels: London, Seville & Saint-Tropez

The Latest Investments: Aston Martin, Fabergé & Christopher Kane

On the spot LuxuryActivist -

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Orient Express turns down a $1.8 billion takeover bid from Indian Hotels Group, as mining company Gemfields seeks to acquire fine jeweller Faberg for $142 million

Acquired: Faberg, Gemfields

Gemfields, pending minority investor approval, is to buy luxury jeweler Faberge from one of the colored gem miner’s own shareholders, in a deal valuing the fine jeweller at $142 million. The all-share deal will create an integrated company that mines colored stones and uses the Faberge brand to promote their use in jewelery.

Source: Reuters

Speculation: Sale, Aston Martin

Investment Dar Co., owner of Aston Martin, is said to be in “advanced” talks to sell new shares to investors to boost funding for future development. The Kuwaiti based investment group has received competing bids from Investindustrial and Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (MM) for 50% of voting rights and a 40% equity stake.

Source: Bloomberg

Rejected: Takeover Bid, Orient-Express

Orient-Express has rejected an unsolicited $1.2 billion takeover offer from Tata Group’s Indian Hotels Co Ltd and a fund controlled by Italy’s Montezemolo & Partners. The unsolicited bid was 43% higher than Orient-Express’s 20-day average price, a record premium for the industry, and valued the company at the highest earnings multiple in six years for a hotel takeover.

Source: Reuters, WSJ

Acquired: Investcorp, Georg Jensen

Bahrain-based alternative asset manager, Investcorp, has purchased Danish luxury retailer Georg Jensen for $140 million. Hazem Ben-Gacem, Investcorp’s European private equity head, will co-chair Georg Jensen, as saying Investcorp planned to expand the Danish brand in Asia, particularly China.

Source: Reuters

Speculation: PPR, Christopher Kane

PPR, helmed by Francois-Henri Pinault, is said to be in discussions with Christopher Kane, to invest in his eponymous brand. The company is believed to have held discussions with Christopher Kane in which financial backing has been offered. Nothing has yet been confirmed and representatives for PPR and Kane were unavailable for comment.

Source: Vogue UK

Acquired: Vionnet, Goga Ashkenazi

Kazakh oil billionaire Goga Ashkenazi has acquired all outstanding shares in Vionnet to become its sole owner. Ms. Ashkenazi bought into Vionnet in May 2012, but has since purchased all remaining shares from past owners Matteo Marzotto and Marni CEO Gianni Castiglioni.

Source: Elle UK

Boughtback: Derek Lam, Labelux

In a bid to refocus on luxury leather goods and shoes, Labelux has sold Derek Lam back to its founders, Lam and CEO Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann. “We have taken a strategic decision to refocus our activity on luxury leather goods and shoes,” explained CEO Reinhard Mieck said. “We wish Derek and Jan well as we return the leadership into their capable hands.”

Source: Fashionista

Invested: Damiani, India

Damiani is the first foreign investor to get the government approval to invest in the jewellery monobrand retail in India, after working with the Indian government to acquire 51% of Damiani India Pvt Ltd, the company managing the Damiani store in New Delhi at the Oberoi Hotel. Damiani will then agree to establish a joint venture with Indian partners.

Source: Damiani

Confirmed: Karl Lagerfeld, Inter Parfums

Karl Lagerfeld has signed a 20 year worldwide license agreement with Inter Parfums, to create and distribute perfumes under the German fashion designer’s namesake brand. Karl Lagerfeld has since ended its deal with fragrance and cosmetics company Coty BV.

Source: Reuters

Sold: Plaza Hotel, Subrata Roy

Indian billionaire Subrata Roy has purchased a 75% stake in New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel for $575m from US-Israeli retailer El Ad. The remaining 25% of the hotel is being retained by its current owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, via his Kingdom Holding group.

Source: BBC

Rejected: Four Seasons Hotel NYC, Asian Buyer

Four Seasons Hotel New York owner H. Ty Warner has decided not to sell the Manhattan property after receiving an unsolicited bid of about $900 million. “Due to the continued strength in the New York real estate market and impending fiscal cliff, he does not feel that this is an advantageous time to sell this iconic property,” explained Donna Snopek, chief financial officer of Ty Warner Hotels and Resorts LLC.

Source: Bloomberg

Invested: DiamondCorp, Laurelton Diamonds

Laurelton Diamonds Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Tiffany & Co., has issued a $6 million term loan to DiamondCorp plc, a South African diamond development and exploration company listed on London’s AIM stock exchange. As part of the loan agreement, Laurelton Diamonds will have the right to purchase production from DiamondCorp’s Lace Mine in South Africa.

Source: WWD

Stake: Luxottica, Salmoiraghi & Vigan

Salmoiraghi & Vigan, a leading Italian company in the eyewear retail sector, has received approximately €45 million from eyewear manufacturer Luxottica. Luxottica will subscribe for newly issued shares of Salmoiraghi & Vigan resulting in a 36% equity stake in the Italian optical retailer, which will retain control of company operations.

Source: 4Traders

Acquired: Four Seasons Toronto, Saudi Prince Walid

Billionaire Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding investment group has purchased the luxury hotel Four Seasons Toronto, Canada for $200 million. “The transaction was funded by a $130 million mortgage loan while $70 million came from (the company’s) own resources,” Hazem al-Dosari, a Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) spokesman, told AFP.

Source: Al Arabiya

Sold: Ekati Diamond Mine, BHP

Diamond company Harry Winston agreed to purchase BHP Billiton’s Ekati mine in Canada and its marketing operations for the precious stones for $500 million. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year, according to BHP.

Source: The Israeli Diamond Industry

Invested: Aeffe, Emanuel Ungaro

Aeffe has signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Emanuel Ungaro for the production and worldwide distribution of women’s clothing and accessories, as well as the option to acquire a significant minority share of Ungaro’s capital stock on achieving shared goals. The license will be active for a period of 7 years, with the option to renew.

Source: Aeffe

For more in the series of The Latest Investments, please see our most recent editions as follows:

- The Latest Investments: Chanel, Marcolin & Orient Express
- The Latest Investments: Anya Hindmarch, Berluti & Harry Winston
- The Latest Investments: Coty, Porsche & Valentino

Blue jeans

On the spot LuxuryActivist -

We’re all savvy these days. We all know our signs and signifiers, that blue jeans aren’t just blue jeans. Above all garments, they are within each of our grasps, yet continue to represent the most potent aspects of street fashion and sub-cultural style: aspiration, fantasy and drama.

Democratic yet so detailed as to simultaneously appeal to elitist instincts, jeans deliver authenticity, that most alluring of all qualities inherent in objects of sartorial desire.

As embodied by the Levi Strauss 501 - an unimpeachable glory of design and content manufactured in San Francisco from hardy cotton twill from France (de Nmes) for cowboys, gold-rush prospectors, farmhands and railroad workers in the 1860s - denim looks and feels mighty real.

When I put together my book The Look - an investigation into the combustion which occurs when great music meets fantastic visual style - and followed the twisted trail which wound from the utility-wear sold in 1946 by Elvis’s tailors Lansky Bros in Memphis to today’s multi-national, multi-billion and monstrous denim label frenzy, I discovered denim, and in particular blue jeans, at every turn.

The beauty of blue jeans lies as much in the story behind their arrival in the arsenal of popular taste, for it was unplanned, as organic as the fabric from which they are made. I was enlightened to this by the late Malcolm McLaren. As well as being the greatest cultural iconoclast of his generation, he was alsoan astute and educated fashion historian.

For it was at McLaren’s early 70s shop Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road that I first encountered jeans presented not as fashion items but as fetishised totems: the straight-legged Levis were neatly arraigned in single pairs, stiff as boards, the Selvedge seams on display and cards carrying washing instructions proudly foregrounded.

“Look at what the beats, people like Jack Kerouac, were wearing after they left the marines and the army and went on the road,” McLaren advised me long ago. “Blue jeans, white t-shirt, leather jacket. When Hollywood looked around for rebellious images which would suit stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, they settled on that look. And when kids in Britain saw it up on the big screen, they wanted it to.”

For many years – decades – big business did not understand denim’s desirability, so could not co-opt it. Far from the mainstream in the 50s, Britain’s first menswear boutique, the subterranean Vince Man’s Shop in Soho, sold some of the first home-made denim in light-blue shades to its largely gay clientele (Sean Connery, then a wannabe actor muscleman, posed in a pair in magazine ads) and Marc Bolan, then Mark Feld and one of the UK’s first mods of the early 60s, used to reminisce how there was just one shop in the whole of London – a surplus store in Leman Street, Whitechapel - which stocked original Levi’s originally intended for US service camps around the UK.

“One day we turned up on 40 scooters and stole the lot,” said Marc during his 70s glam heyday. “They were there, one wanted them so one took them. My scooter zipped off without me so I stuck a couple of pairs up my jumper, ran down the road and jumped a bus. My heart was pounding; it was great knowing we were the only ones among a few people in England who had them. That was very funky.”

It was also smart: Modernists such as Bolan prided themselves on The Who manager Pete Meaden’s standard line for his peers: “Clean living through difficult circumstances.” Conversely the art-school graduates who powered the beat boom and British music – the Stones, the Pretty Things, The Kinks – incorporated denims into the scruffy, blues-associating coffee-bar look of Chelsea boots, matelot shirts and pea-coats. That way they could identify with the founding fathers of black music such as Leadbelly, who had been forced to wear denim during his years on the Texas chain gang. One of these young Brits, Peter Golding – who later invented stretch denim in the 70s – even moved to the Beat Hotel in Paris. “I busked on the boulevards and understood the relationship between railroad blues and dungarees,” he once told me.

In the years after the beats, art students and mods, denim was embraced by rockers, Hell’s Angels, skinheads, punks, rockabillies, casuals, hip-hop crews...hell, at the height of Baggy, acid-housers and Cheesy Quavers donned dungarees as the ultimate ant-fashion statement. And in doing so, naturally, effortlessly, in their very British way, they made a fashion statement.

It is here, down the years and in this diversity, that the seriously significant element of any enduring garment comes into play: mutability. At every price point, in different silhouettes and shades, with every conceivable elaboration and variation of detail, denim has multiplied, proliferated and survived.

And so today we crave Fennica x Orslow’s stunning adherence to traditional values and appreciate the recasting of this staple in a contemporary context by the likes of Christopher Shannon[below]and Martine Rose[above].

Denim’s ability to withstand renewed waves of invention, nuance and flair is evident at Pokit, the Wardour Street shop situated just a few hundred yards from where Vince Man Shop traded in flamboyant “Continental-wear” jeans in the 50s.

Pokit’s Seven Foot Cowboy range is the result of Bayode Oduwole’s investigations into the styles worn by rodeo riders down the decades: “We wanted to look at the larger than life characters of the west, the melting pot who made America and the world what it is today,” he says, using an example the side-buttoning Crazyhorse, which have a yoke inspired by those on the seat of Hussar Guard’s britches while the high-waisted shape utilises the roomy design for jeans worn by rodeo clowns, who need maximum mobility to perform their stunts safely.

As worn by Dexys leader Kevin Rowland on the cover to last year’s stand-out album One Day I’m Gonna Fly, the Crazyhorse represents all that is great about denim jeans. I ask you, which other garment could contain circus and military references so comfortably? And which continues to exude toughness and cool in equal measure?

William S. Burroughs’s Shot Gun Paintings

On the spot LuxuryActivist -

William S. Burroughs is cemented in the popular imagination as the archetypal literary outlaw, the third part of a holy trinity of Beats; father to Ginsberg’s son and Kerouac’s ghost. Novels including Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch pioneered a new and uniquely American literary form, shamanistic and paranoid, sanctifying the outsider. But Burroughs’ experiments in form and creative process extended beyond writing into film, sound and the visual arts, and he spent much of his later years in Kansas making paintings. A selection of those works can be seen in All out of time and into space at October Gallery, London.

In advance of the opening I caught up with Kathelin Gray, founder of the Theater of all Possibilities and a close friend of Burroughs, to talk about the man, his paintings, and how the mythology surrounding the most American of artists might impede our appreciation of his work.

Burroughs is best known here as a writer, so I wonder if you could expand on the relationship between his literary and painterly practice.

Burroughs had associated with artists through the forties and fifties, the era of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. He was very influenced by process art, recombinant art, by art that incorporated incorporating text into paintings, and he was always concerned with the relationship between word and image. Burroughs thought in images, in symbols, and that’s visible in both his writing and his painting.

How influential was Brion Gysin on Burroughs’ work as a visual artist?

Gysin and Burroughs began to collaborate in Paris in 1959, when they were living together in the Beat Hotel. Gysin had steeped himself in the cabbalistic traditions of North Africa and his work drew heavily on ritual and magic; that influenced Burroughs, who was more scientific in his approach. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut up too – he realised one day, when he was cutting through newspaper with an Exacto knife, that the strips could be recombined and the word sequences re-examined.

What was so attractive about the cut up technique to Burroughs?

He saw it as a means of undermining the power structures that govern the behaviour of the populous. Burroughs was constantly trying to get at the way that things are programmed beneath the surface. The cut-up technique was one of the tools by which he did this, but not the only one.

What were the other tools, the other processes? With respect to the paintings I’m thinking of those abstract compositions creating by taking a shotgun to a can of spray paint…

Well I think Burroughs and Gysin met [auto-destructive artist] Gustav Metzger at one of his early lectures at Cambridge. Metzger was fed up with the commodification of art and was trying to get back to the act, the essence of what’s done by the artist in the moment of creation. That was another influence.

But Burroughs didn’t start painting until late in his life?

Burroughs really began painting in 1987, in Kansas, the year after Gysin died. Burroughs was devastated by Gysin’s death – he was the only man he ever truly respected as a man and an artist. You know, Burroughs only really started writing after he killed his wife Joan [in a drunken and famously ill-advised game of William Tell], and I think that taking up painting represented another way of working through trauma.

What of the way that Burroughs is perceived now?

I’m really not keen on the Burroughs stereotype of him with the needle in his arm and the three-piece suit, because that’s not what he was.

You don’t think he deliberately cultivated that iconography?

He cultivated the iconography but not the stereotype. I wouldn’t say that he resented the stereotype – it’s just that it’s counterproductive when it comes to understanding his work.

He was always keen to dissociate himself from the Beat Generation, which hasn’t stopped him being lumped in with them by posterity. How did he consider his work, and that of Gysin, to be different from that of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Gregory Corso?

He was a close friend with Ginsberg, particularly, but he wasn’t like the Beats – he wasn’t a Buddhist, he wasn’t Zen, he didn’t like jazz, he wasn’t cool. Burroughs’ work was about deconstructing the hypnotic effect on human nature of the corporate world, the military-industrial complex, and the military-educational complex. He was extremely concerned by the ecological devastation of the planet, by terrorism, by the militarisation of society, and he deeply wanted to create tools that would allow the individual to think for themselves. That drove everything that he did.

Benjamin Eastham

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