Sitting in the comfort of an exclusive business lounge, Sanjiv Malhotra, executive vice president of Shaza Hotels is at home. Urbane and self-assured, he exudes everything that the hotel chain stands for: confident yet modest, refined and cultured with a business edginess that never drops.

He describes the objective of the hotel chain: “Shaza Hotels is a luxury brand in the making; a joint venture with Kempinski Hotels,” he explains. The collaboration brings together the 100-plus years’ experience and recognisable Kempinski brand and the distinctive offering of the niche Shaza brand.

So what makes Shaza hotels different from the plethora of hotels that are springing up like mushrooms throughout the Gulf?

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“While it’s an affiliate of Kempinski, it is also an independent luxury brand that aims to create a presence within the geographical footprint of the Middle East and the North Africa region,” Malhotra elaborates.

“The major difference being that this is a brand of luxury hotels that seeks to embrace the cultures of the Arabian lifestyle.” Malhotra emphasises that the chain will “only extend into those destinations where there is a market that is seeking to fulfil the Arabian traveller.”

He explains that while it may seem that Shaza appeared suddenly on the hospitality horizon, it was in fact years in the making. “The brand’s formation started about four to five years ago, the brainchild of Dr Mohammad Hammour, a former MIT professor, who runs a real estate finance firm called Capital Guidance, based in Europe, the US and Malaysia.”

‘Vision Custodian’, Dr Hammour, the story goes, saw an opportunity for a brand that captured the Arabian culture, without in-your-face, ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ theming – something more contemporary and subtle.

“The market already has a deluge of hotels that are either too westernised or too stereotypical,” says Malhotra, adding that architectural representation of a culture or civilization doesn’t have to be overdone to get the design elements over.

“We drew inspiration from Mandarin Oriental by way of design treatment, as it does a marvellous job of representing the Chinese civilization, regardless of location,” he says.

Hammour’s vision was to recreate the same subtlety and respect for the Middle Eastern traditions, within a luxury hotel chain, and Shaza was born.

Shaza hotels will support the halal lifestyle, from underplayed, tastefully placed mashrabiya interior design elements, to cuisine, food preparation, training and authentic “rituals and services”, Malhotra explains.

While every hotel brand wants to be distinctive and be seen as different, the Arabic culture is one of hospitality, where Bedouins would welcome a weary traveller into their desert tents and offer them sustenance and a place to rest their weary head. This, on a grander, more luxurious scale, is the ethos of the Shaza Hotel chain – “a true representation of the Arabian culture,” he adds proudly.