It’s been said you fell into hotels accidentally.
I was a lawyer doing a lot of bankruptcy work, and I noticed a lot of beautiful buildings coming across my desk that were being sold at a fraction of their previous value. One of them came up again and again, which turned out to be what is now Hotel 1929 in the red light area of [Singapore’s] Chinatown. That was my first hotel, which opened in 2003.
Your seven boutique hotels—in London, Singapore, Shanghai, and most recently Sydney—are in unusual buildings or off the beaten path. How do you pick the locations?
A lot of it is opportunistic. Generally speaking, people introduce a property to me, and I fall in love with it, and then it happens, rather than me going out looking for it. They tend to be buildings with a lot of character or conservation buildings, in some odd locations.
And each property has an individual spirit.
That’s the idea around the name, Unlisted Collection. We don’t have a brand because each project tends to be a one-off individual. There are not obvious connections between the different hotels [except they] happen to be owned and managed by me.
Many of your hotels have whimsical interiors. What’s your approach to design?
People always say they want their hotels to be a home away from home. I want my hotels to be nothing like my home. I want a different experience. We want designers to push the envelope a bit, because we’re not trying to design for a broad demographic—we’re trying to design for people for whom design matters and would find the neighborhoods appealing. It’s a conscious decision. Our demographic is a bit more adventurous.
You also operate some 20 restaurants—how did that come about?
I didn’t think of doing restaurants, but because we were doing hotels, we had to have restaurants, and we were lucky that the first few were immensely successful—they came to be almost equals to the hotels, which is slightly unusual. It led us to branch off into doing independent restaurants. You can’t really do a hotel every year; restaurants, you can do three or four a year. I became in a sense an accidental restaurateur.
