However stylish the book is, Walshe is adamant that the goal is not to be “cool” but to be “relevant”, from design through to service.
“It’s trying to recognise who will be the customer that will walk through the door. I want to give something that’s great design but more importantly, we’ve never been in search of being labelled cool. I want to be relevant, so it’s about having a clear understanding of who the customer is and programming and designing around it,” says Walshe.
As such, four of the hotels — Avalon in Beverley hills, Zetta in San Francisco, Cassa in New York, and Delfina in Santa Monica — don’t even have the Viceroy name, but are “urban retreats by Viceroy”.
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“A good example would be the hotel we opened in San Francisco last year,” continues Walshe. “Before designing and opening it, we went to the market and we said ‘well, what’s the demand and who’s the customer?’ It’s Silicon Valley — they’re young, playful, but very serious about what they do.
“They don’t conform to normal dress standards or presentation but every hotel in town is conforming to traditional presentation standards, so we created Hotel Zetta, which is very playful, very eccentric and speaks to them, and the reaction of the market was: ‘finally, somebody gets us’. They’ve adopted the hotel and now we’re market leaders.
“So what we do when we’re coming into a market is to go into a very detailed research process to say who is the customer, what will they react positively to, and then we kind of co-create the design of the hotel with that voice of the customer, with them in mind.”
Sometimes, that means the Viceroy name is not essential. “There are certain hotels where the individuality is such that we’re happy to put a signature on them but allow them to carry their own expression,” explains Walshe. “They’re my incubators, they are where we throw out new ideas, that’s where I road test young talent, I give general managers their first break and say ‘you know what, go and play, show me what you can do’, and then graduate them through the ranks and we have a lot of fun with that”.
Individuality is also key at core branded hotels, for example at Viceroy New York, the newest hotel, and the upcoming Dubai hotels. After all, with three properties signed for one small city, Viceroy’s “individual programming” will be critical in tapping into different market segments.
“In terms of the segments that they’ll speak to, one of the hotels is going to have a large ballroom, the other one won’t, so therefore the group segment will play in one, not in the other,” says Walshe of the two hotels signed with Arabtec in April — Viceroy Dubai Sheikh Zayed Road and Viceroy Dubai Business Bay.
“The interior design approach, the architectural programming are being handled by different companies to ensure a strong expression of individuality.”
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