Rocco Forte Hotels will open its first hotel in the region this year and the first to bear the name of the company’s founder and CEO, Sir Rocco Forte. With it, the company brings its modern approach to service and style, says Richard Power, the brand managing director
Richard Power is one of those terribly likeable chaps that one could happily talk to for hours. This is especially so when it comes to the history, philosophy and design of Rocco Forte Hotels, upon which Power is an expert.
He has worked alongside Sir Rocco Forte for close to 30 years now, firstly during the times of Forte Plc — which at its zenith comprised more than 800 hotels, 1000 restaurants and 100,000 employees — and now at Rocco Forte Hotels, the luxury brand Power helped found in 1996.
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Forte Plc was sold after a hostile takeover bid, which ultimately saw the company being broken up, and Sir Rocco, his sister Olga Polizzi and Power were left jobless, but with the opportunity to create something entirely based on their shared experience.
“In 1996 we were out of a job, so we decided ‘let’s start another one, but let’s focus on the upmarket area and let’s keep it small’. In a company of that size [Forte Plc] you spend all of your time in board meetings and not much time with customers and the team, and we wanted something more hands on,” recalls Power.
And so Rocco Forte Hotels was founded, with the intention of creating a small collection of luxury hotels in key European destinations, not to mention a brand to rival Europe’s biggest luxury operator, Four Seasons.
“We tried to build our brand to make it something different and the main difference in the early stages was Sir Rocco’s sister Olga Polizzi, who was the design director in the old Forte company and is our design director, and lots more in fact, in the present one,” says Power.
“She felt freed from the men in suits as she called them, she could design something different in hotels. So what Olga’s done is tried to do design that’s less formal, perhaps a bit simpler, but is at the same time very sophisticated. She introduced quite a degree of modernity into the brand at the early stages. From her work came the local roots that we have for each of the hotels.”
Fast forward 15 years and Rocco Forte Hotels now operates 13 hotels in Europe and has signed five hotels outside of the continent — all in the Middle East and North Africa.
The first property is just a few months away from opening in the UAE capital and, as with the previous hotels, the design is expected to provide a point of differentiation in a market that is set to welcome close to 2700 new rooms in the last quarter of 2011 in the luxury segment alone.
Spanning 11 levels, the 28,000m² Rocco Forte Abu Dhabi has been developed in conjunction with Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC) and the UAE’s Al Farida Investments Company L.L.C.
“They had done quite a lot of design and a bit of the building before we came on board, but as we’re not in the business of just bolting anything onto our brand, one of the reasons it’s a bit delayed really is that we agreed with them that we would go back and sort of ‘Forte-fy it’ make it feel much more like a Rocco Forte hotel, even though it’s a bit bigger than our normal size,” says Power.
“I think the designers have managed to make it something that’s really quite quirky and I think it will be quite talked about,” he says of the building, a wave-shaped tower with a blue and green glass façade.
“Firstly, it’s shaped a bit like a wave so instead of just having a straight corridor and straight walls, the corridors and the walls go down the waves. There is a huge atrium with a restaurant on the bottom, another restaurant around the edges and then a bar suspended from the ceiling. Coming from the Corniche side, the back of it looks a bit like an ocean liner, it comes down in steps and the roof of each step has a guard light — it looks like an ocean liner rolling off to Dubai.”
The guest rooms have been tweaked too, says Power, to bring them into the Rocco Forte “family” and each of the 281 rooms features leather accents and seating, as well as the Arabic expression ‘May it rain on our desert’ etched above each large bathtub, opposite the walk-in shower.
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