My father was born in India but I was born, brought up and educated in England, and I took a lot of my childhood vacations in Italy. My father spent most of his life in Britain, with a few years in Zurich. He started a business in Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1960s and developed a farm in the north of Nigeria in the 1970s. I spent a lot of my time between the ages of six and eight on that farm. One of my earliest memories of the hotel industry was from the Villa D'Este on Lake Como, which was one of the top leisure hotels of the world at the time. I was about seven years old and I remember the grand entrance, the terrace looking out on the lake, the immaculate grand hotel style, the traditional Italian uniforms and the hotel's attention to detail and service.
Another memory from the same time was exactly the opposite: it was in a hotel in Canton, now Guangzhou, in China. It was during the main trade fair there (my father used to visit China in the mid 1970s to buy goods). Big flakes of plaster were falling from the ceiling. The bathroom was quite squalid. You could not get further away from the Villa D'Este. My wife, Eva, and I used to enjoy going on holiday to the Maldives and we wanted to offer a different concept: a very exclusive resort with fewer villas. We went to see Kunfunadhoo Island and fell in love with it. This was our first development and it's now better known as Soneva Fushi by Six Senses. The island had been abandoned since 1979 when the previous resort had closed. In those days, the boats were not very sophisticated, so it would take some guests three days to transfer the last 100km across the channel. That resort failed because of this. Today's travellers want destinations that are at the same time remote and easy to reach.
When we took the resort over, all the hardship began in terms of developing a deserted island and building in an environment where there are no construction companies and where supplies can be very difficult to find. At that time, we were the only resort in that atoll, so we had 60 uninhabited islands to ourselves. Things were difficult at first but one of the keys to our success early on was that we organised an air service, which immediately made the island more accessible to guests.
The growth and development of Dubai has certainly raised awareness of the Middle East. However, Six Senses is very much attracted to the traditional aspects of the Middle East in terms of the culture, the food and the architecture. This is reflected in our first two properties in the region: in Jordan and the Musandam Peninsula. The Maldives is our base at the moment. It is the origin of our philosophy of intelligent luxury, where we question and try to understand what is truly luxurious to the wealthy 21st-century traveller. Our customers live in urban areas with high population densities, air pollution and a shortage of space. The organic garden, the banning of imported water and the "no news, no shoes" policy are examples of intelligent luxury.
Our clients tend to live in cities where having a fresh garden salad is impossible. They usually travel a lot, so when they go on holiday with us they do not have to pack shoes and clothes to impress others. The ability to go around barefoot and not dress up is really luxurious for some people.
