The Domain Hotels general manager Patrick de Groot tells Louise Oakley his vision for the highly sociable hotel-members club concept opening in Bahrain later this year
Patrick de Groot has spent the majority of his hotel career in the Middle East, first coming to Bahrain with Forte Grand in 1995, before joining Hyatt in Muscat and then Jumeirah Group, first in sales and marketing and later, as director of development.
Then, with his first baby on the way, de Groot left hotels behind him to set up a company called Just Kidding, a wholesale and online business specialising in quality baby products, but like so many hoteliers, he says it wasn’t long before “the hotel itch got back in my blood.”
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The right opportunities have a funny way of appearing when we need them most and for de Groot, it was a meeting with Bahraini businessman Faisal Al Matrook that reignited his passion for hospitality.
“He is from Bahrain but lives in Dubai and is married to an Emirati. I got introduced to him and over a couple of lunches we discussed his desire to get into the hospitality industry. He has got a very wide portfolio in his business interests, mostly to do with development, building materials, concrete and so on.
We struck up a really good relationship and it ended up with him bringing me on board to set up his hospitality division. From that, over the last two years it’s been a super platform to develop a hotel product from scratch,” says de Groot.
And so The Domain Hotels was born, a home-grown Bahrain firm, part of the Al Matrook Group of Companies, but a hotel brand with a difference. The first property, The Domain Bahrain, is set to open on September 15 and is designed to offer a “socially charged members club” with the added benefit of hotel rooms.
A 36-storey, 129-key property located in Manama’s Diplomatic District, The Domain Bahrain is “first and foremost” a members club, with F&B facilities outweighing the room offering by 70:30.
What exactly does this mean, how will it work and where did the rationale come from? De Groot can barely get a word in; I have so many questions about this hotel-club chameleon he will be running.
From the outset, recalls de Groot, the desire was to develop a luxury boutique positioning to meet the needs of high income travellers combining business and leisure, and to do this, he says his first call was to ex-colleague Angie Hall.
“It always starts with people. When I started getting my bearings on this project, the first thing I did was pick up the telephone and call a couple of friends and ex-colleagues of mine.
[Angie] and I had worked on a number of projects together, she has given me a lot of advice over the years in branding and marketing and I couldn’t have called a better person to assist me in developing the brand for the hotel. We started with concept development before the brand really. We were really clear about how we wanted to position the hotel.
“I think the boutique hotel scene is one where the higher room rate is being paid and with that comes a target audience that is typically quite well off, and I think in that higher income group of people, leisure and work typically blend a lot.
People that are well off, they don’t do work that they don’t like. They typically go to work with quite a bit of enthusiasm, they like their work and they make sure they spend enough time having fun at work as well,” asserts de Groot.
For inspiration, he says they looked at brands from Soho House to W as benchmarks, but ultimately “decided to just go ahead and carve out a niche for ourselves.”
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