NEW OPENING: The Domain Bahrain

Hotelier Middle East gets an exclusive look at the owner-operated Domain Hotel in Bahrain, which aims to bring a social club element to the region’s luxury hotels

Few hotels today pique our curiosity quite the way The Domain Bahrain did. Most hotels in the Middle East tend to be part of large global chains, and while the introduction of new brands always creates a buzz, The Domain Bahrain caught Hotelier’s attention with its social-club/ boutique hotel concept — an idea we couldn’t quite get our heads around.

At the helm of the operation is managing director Patrick De Groot, who has previously worked with the Jumeirah Group and Kempinski Hotels.

“The owners wanted to develop their own hospitality division, rather than just being an asset management company and letting the management of this property be taken care of by a typical hotel operator. They wanted to create their own brand,” he explains.

Defining the concept for The Domain was a lot of work, says De Groot. While the owner was clear about it being a luxury proposition, De Groot was also wary of the popularity of luxury hotels in the Middle East. Instead, the team took inspiration from new age boutique hotels and focused their efforts on building a social club with a luxury boutique element.

“Knowing that we had quite a large number of suites — in fact we had half suites, half bedrooms — added to the conviction that we were on the right track because a boutique hotel typically has a larger ratio of suites, and creating a social club and a luxury offering works well.

The moment you start focusing on having more suite guests, the guests tend to have a higher than average expendable income, and will typically be looking for more choice,” explains De Groot.

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Brand Values
Rolling out the hotel’s social concept has taken more time than expected admits De Groot. A membership scheme, however, is due to roll out soon.

“I would like to think that we are currently in an information age where we have enough data that we can make relevant introductions between members and members, members and guests, guests and guests.

Very few hotels are actually doing this because they are afraid they will overstep this thin line and as a hotel we have to be very careful that we don’t breech that privacy that a guest expects. However, there are plenty of opportunities where, without disclosing one another’s contact details, you can still create a social space,” he states.

The concept works by creating a platform similar to Facebook, called The Conversation, where members and guests can ‘Domain’ one another to connect and have private conversations. Domain managers at the hotel can also facilitate networking by making introductions for guests.

Other benefits that members can look forward to include preferential treatment when making restaurant and lounge bookings, and invitations to social events.

By embracing a social concept in a business district location, De Groot believes the hotel will appeal to both business and leisure travellers in the luxury segment.

“Since we are a social club as well as a business hotel, I’d like to think that ultimately our members are not just going to be Bahrain-based but also Saudi-based, Kuwait-based, and they are going to use this place as a base to meet up with their friends and family and spend quality social time here.

We deliberately chose not to have a big karaoke band or a sports bar — we wanted to be a bit more upmarket and have a bit more refinement and elegance and class in our social spaces,” explains De Groot.

“I think our segmentation is such that there is a corporate base, but that same corporate base may travel as an FIT three days later on the weekend. I think the social membership adds to that as well,” he says.

While the hotel is working hard to promote itself as a social club, almost four months in, De Groot admits occupancy is not where he hoped it would be, with the hotel only 35% full when Hotelier visited.

“It’s not where I want to be, but at least we are heading in the right direction,” he says. “But the reception has been good... the hotel is liked immensely well by our customer base. Whenever I see my guests in the restaurants or those who stay in the hotel, they have been unanimously raving about their experience and that I think is in large part due to the team.”

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Room Requirements
Apart from focusing on the hotel’s social concepts during the development phase, the rooms division was hard at work creating spaces that reflected the hotel’s elegant and boutique theme.

Room sizes vary between 33ft2 to 72ft2 and all rooms are equipped with flat screen TVs, a mediahub to plug in phones and laptops, and complimentary mini bars. With muted colours and floor to ceiling windows, the rooms are meant to offer a space for relaxation.

“The theme reflects the colours outside – they are not that bright in general. We used very soothing colours and the paintings provide a flash of colour to brighten up the room. We wanted to keep the room free of clutter as much as possible,” explains director of rooms Reza Sinnen.

The rooms are fitted out with locally manufactured furniture — a decision De Groot says reflects the hotel’s effort to support Bahrain’s economy.

“We as a company have made a serious commitment to investing wherever possible in the local community. I was sent to China to shop for furniture and we had everything worked out and agreed upon – the designs, costs, etc.

And I thought Bahrain is capable of producing furniture; we owe it not only to ourselves as a Bahraini company, but also to the environment and to the economy of Bahrain to at least explore whether we can send the business here.

“If you take the cost price of producing furniture in China, and you add the shipping price, that’s basically the price you’ll get in Bahrain. So if a company in Bahrain can produce it at the same time, in the same price, with the same specs, and the same quality, why would we go somewhere else?

If we make a multimillion dollar investment in Bahrain and we can keep that money flowing into the economy rather than any other country, I think that is corporate social responsibility, more than anything else, and that was a very simple decision for us to make,” he explains.

While sourcing furniture locally was a no brainer for De Groot’s team, Reza Sinnen was faced with the challenges of sourcing consumables in Bahrain — an experience that that is quite different to what he had faced in Dubai, where Sinnen worked before his move to Bahrain.

“Sourcing products within Bahrain is very difficult. When you start operating a hotel you need things like toilet paper, you need to have consumables, stationery. We are new here so Bahrain is more difficult than Dubai for example,” Sinnen observes.

“The service from suppliers is very bad. They have their own mentality, they have their own style, they have their own way of doing things, and we have to be very careful to have enough stock, which is unusual compared to other places. This is one of my key challenges,” he laments.

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Social Spaces
A key element of The Domain’s concept is the hotel’s food and beverage offering. Restaurants and lounges at the hotel are called social spaces to tie in with the hotel’s concept.

Restaurants at the hotel include a Basque tapas bar called Txoko, which offers panoramic views over the city; a Japanese lounge called Imari, which specialises in the Izakaya concept of sharing platters along with a selection of robotayaki; and all-day dining restaurant, Figs & Olives, which offers an a la carte menu of Lebanese and Mediterranean cuisine.

Also part of the F&B offering is a French duo of restaurants called Le Sauvage and Le Domain — while Le Sauvage (which means ‘the wild’ in French) focuses on meats and steak; Le Domain is meant to reflect a more ‘feminine’ theme with lighter cuisine and a heavy focus on seafood.

The team, led by executive assistant manager F&B Kim Andersen, has been working on introducing the concepts to the Bahraini market. The main challenge for Andersen, whose previous experience in the Middle East is exclusive to Dubai, is competing with independent restaurants in the city, especially those that are licensed.

“Five kilometres from here you have 30 or 40 restaurants confined in one area ... and it has everything from Indian to Chinese, to The Meat Company. So I guess one of the challenges here is to turn this into a destination where people can come and have French food, Japanese food, Spanish food, Lebanese cuisine; there are so many different flavours here.

So we are really focusing on superb quality and ensuring that the product served and the service given is good and when people come here, they realise that they didn’t pay five-star prices and know that what they would spend here is similar money to an independent restaurant and then come back here,” says Andersen.

Chef de cuisine Bengt Carlsson, who has previously worked with Andersen, believes the hotel’s liquor licence is not the draw and asserts that the restaurants create their own niche by focusing on a particular element of the cuisine offered.

“We don’t use liquor to market ourselves. We probably wouldn’t even if only hotels were licensed like in Dubai. It’s tougher, definitely, but we still believe we have that quality, and also we create a niche. For instance, we are not just a French restaurant, we are southern French; we are not a Japanese restaurant, we are izakaya; or we are not just a Spanish restaurant, we serve Basque tapas.

So we try a little bit harder to be niche. For me it’s always about the quality of the food; that’s what we use as the argument,” he declares.

Most restaurants also adopt a sharing concept, which Andersen believes differentiates them from other restaurants.

“The food is very much cutting edge in terms of food presentation and the sizes of the dishes. You get the opportunity to try a lot of different things.

I think business people today don’t eat and drink too much like they used to — they like smaller things, smaller portions, to try out different things. And the sharing concept in various restaurants really gives you the opportunity to try out many things,” he explains.

The sharing concept the restaurants promote also happens to be in sync with the hotel’s social engagement theme, offering more chances to socialise.

“We’ve worked very hard on creating reasons and a multitude of venues within this building where people can socialise. I think actively providing the opportunity, venue, entertainment, and food and beverage to promote that kind of real time social engagement... that is the real premise of The Domain,” says De Groot.