Yahoo Finance Inside the incredible JW Marriott Phu Quoc
Since founding his practice in 1987, the Harvard-educated American designer Bill Bensley has designed more than 200 hotels in 30 or so countries. Notably, though, they have been in Thailand, where his practice is based and the standout is arguably The Siam in Bangkok; and increasingly Cambodia. Here his ongoing projects range from forthcoming Shinta Mani Wild, which he owns, Cambodia’s first eco encampment of lavishly specced tents on stilt, distinctively Khmer in style, set along over a mile of fast-moving river in a 400-acre valley that straddles the Bokor and Kirirom National Parks.
The tents, he says, have been designed “to invoke the feeling of what it would have been like to be on a luxury safari in the jungles of Cambodia with Jacky O”. It will be a sibling to Shinta Mani Resort in Siem Reap, the latter, in his words, “a four-star hotel with a heart alongside a free school for very needy kids”. Above the elegant buttoned sofas and vast ottoman in the neo-French colonial lobby, for instance, hangs an arresting sculpture of a bear, the work not of an artist, but children from a local orphanage.
In establishing his own brand of hotels, The Bensley Collection, he has assumed complete freedom to do his own thing, so to speak. But he works for major brands as well, having designed the Anantaras in Chiang Rai and Phuket, the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle, the Park Hyatt in Siem Reap, and most recently, the JW Marriott Phu Quoc Emerald Bay Resort and Spa in Vietnam, a project in which, even by his own extraordinary standards, he might be said to have stretched the boundaries of his imagination.
A 50-minute flight from Ho Chi Minh City, on the largest of its islands in the Gulf of Thailand, the hotel opened earlier this year (though its eight premium villas were completed only week or two ago) and cost, so estimates have put it, close on $250 million, quite a tidy sum given the distance US dollars can go in Saigon’s marvelous markets. Its signature villa, for instance, which opens in November, will have its own 50m infinity pool.
But then Bensley hasn’t just designed a hotel, he’s conjured a little town, a whimsical place of brightly painted, lantern-lit streets that look as though they’ve stood there for decades, complete with an elaborate back story. Facing the platinum sands of Khem beach, the hotel has been converted, so his narrative goes, from the crumbling campus of a colonial university, named after the important French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, founded in 1880 and which lasted till 1940 when formerly French but by then Vichy Indochina yielded to Japan, after which the site was abandoned.
Now, with backing from the India-based global investors Sun Group, Marriott International’s flagship brand has “restored” it, “transforming” it into a resort and having no little fun in the process. The cocktail bar, for instance, is located in what they’re pretending was the chemistry department; the gym and other activities are run out the former department of phys ed.
Bensley has experimented with styles Asian and European. Those buildings on its main “street” are quite modest and traditional, conforming to the essence of the local vernacular Hoi An style. But, says Bensley, as the university grew and more people came, so the influence of other cultures was brought to bear – notably Chinese and Japanese – and the buildings got bigger and grander, the better to cater to established distinguished guests.
It is a fantastical place, a sort of 21st-century Asian Portmeirion, a complete one-off and nothing at all like most JW Marriotts. I only wonder why they didn’t give it a more fanciful, more evocative name.
Doubles from US$340 including breakfast but excluding tax and service a night, www.jwmarriottphuquoc.com
