Few—if any—hotel brands can claim a heritage as firmly rooted in the design arts as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, founded after all, by architect and builder Isadore Sharp. Starting in the 1960s, the Toronto native developed (but didn’t design) the first hotels for the brand in Canada’s largest city. Those included an initial eponymous 150-room motel, opened in 1961, and 1963’s Inn on the Park. Four Seasons had expanded to London by 1970, and by the end of the decade cracked the U.S. market with a hotel in Washington, DC, laying the groundwork for its rapid expansion. Along the way, the brand became a mix of resort properties, historic palace renovations, and forays into world capitals hitherto unexplored by North American hoteliers.
Four Seasons Hotel Casa Medina Bogota
What never changed, explains Christopher Norton, the company’s executive vice president of global product and operations, were the brand’s “core values—the timbers that hold the company together.” Norton’s hospitality career started with a fascination with a friend’s family hotel outside of Zurich, followed by an apprenticeship at Zurich’s famed Baur au Lac hotel and an education at Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland. After a host of other hotel positions, Norton landed at Four Seasons in 1989, where he’s found, he says, those core values defined as a commitment to quality, service, and a corporate culture that emphasizes the Golden Rule.
Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach
Explosive Growth
Now, after identifying 400 locations that can support a luxury hotel (or, at least, another one) of this caliber, the brand is poised to add to its current 95 properties at a brisk pace. “We’ve just opened four properties, and we will open several more this year,” Norton says. Some of the most recent additions include properties in Orlando, Johannesburg, Moscow, and Bahrain Bay in Dubai.
Four Season Hotel the Westcliff Johannesburg
Four Seasons Hotel Bahrain Bay
This year’s newcomers include a mix of new builds and reflags. For its fifth property in Hawaii—the 365-room Four Seasons Resort Oahu at Ko Olina—the company is converting an existing resort, originally designed by noted architect Edward Killingsworth. That’s the case, too, with a second property in Miami Beach, the 317-room Four Seasons Hotel at the Surf Club, a revitalization and expansion of an iconic 1930s property by local architect Russell Pancoast that will be helmed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Richard Meier. In addition, the brand recently announced that two existing properties in Bogota, Colombia will be renovated and reopened as Four Seasons.
Four Seasons Hotel Moscow
Meanwhile, the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul is a mix of old and new, adding a 25-story, 317-room building onto the foundations of a 15th-century palace; and the 186-room Four Seasons Hotel Casablanca, opening later this year, is a new build that’s part of an upscale mixed-use development in Morocco’s largest city. “Starting in 2016, we’re looking at adding an average of a dozen hotels per year”—a 10 percent growth rate, Norton says.
Four Seasons Resort Orlando
Brand Refresh
“To survive, we need to continue to reinvent ourselves,” Norton says. “It has to be very clear that we have absolutely no wish to be the same places as the ones where your grandparents stayed.”
Design, of course, has a role in this directive. “We’ve become very active in meeting with new designers,” Norton says. “About 80 percent of projects under construction are being designed by people new to the brand. As a result, what you will see in Surf Club Miami, for instance, will be very relevant to today and totally different for our brand.” There, Paris-based designer Joseph Dirand has crafted bright, minimalist interiors of white with green accents. “It’s young and fresh, but with that sense of quality immediately apparent,” Norton says.
Name Recognition
The company has long resisted any notions of brand extensions. “We’ve hashed through the idea countless times,” says Norton. “Should we add a 4-Star, a 3-Star, the extended stay, the boutique brand? But what’s become clear for us is that our strength is in being single-brand focused. The names Inn on the Park, say, or Regent, which we acquired in 1992, are gone from our properties. We are one brand with one mission,” and that is to deliver an exceptional experience. “That holds whether it’s 20 tents in the Thai jungle, the Georges V off the Champs-Elysees, or an I.M. Pei-designed skyscraper in Manhattan.” That said, he continues, “our values won’t change, but the look and feel of our hotels, the technology we use in our guestrooms, the concepts we introduce, may.”
From the start Four Seasons has pursued new-to-the-industry initiatives such as branded private residences (1985) and full-service spas (1986). Most recently, it’s taken off—literally—in a new direction with a branded jet that offers a host of ambitious itineraries, many of which have sold out. “Its success speaks to the enormous desire on the part of the luxury consumer to be associated with a brand they can trust,” Norton says. “Just as we’ve translated that into the homes and residences,” (about 70 percent of Four Seasons’ new builds incorporate a residential component) “we’ve done so with the private jet. Yesterday’s first-class passenger has become today’s private jet traveler.”
Beyond Luxury
Although luxury is a given, it’s not an operating principle for Four Seasons. “Our focus has always been on people,” Norton says. “More so than ever that means attention to detail, customization, and personalization—qualities that we’ve always been strong in.” But luxury doesn’t mean opulence. “First and foremost, we always try to bring a certain residential quality to our properties, but within that we are never cookie-cutter,” he says. “Our designers are very aware of the colors and materials that convey a sense of a particular place.” And while the brand is responsive to changes in what consumers want, you won’t catch it following every trend. “We would never do a party hotel,” Norton says.
