Beyond Luxury
A Texas company has shocked London by taking over one of the world’s most expensive hotels—only a block from Buckingham Palace.
On December 31, 1991, after great hype and speculation, the Lanesborough, London’s most expensive hotel, held its long-awaited opening. London society was properly abuzz. Not only was the hotel on historic Hyde Park Corner, one of the most exclusive addresses in the world, but it was already heralding itself as “beyond luxury.” A simple room for two would cost $396 a night, a regular suite would go for $1,035, and the Royal Suite (a three-bedroom apartment with a drawing room, dining room, personal butler, round-the-clock chauffeur, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace) would set you back a mere $4,500.
The big news about the Lanesborough, however, was not its spectacular prices. It was that the hotel was being run by … Texans! And not just any Texans. These Texans were from Dallas, which all of England knew as the setting of the notorious soap opera starring Larry Hagman. Stuffy Londoners were not particularly amused. Where, they wanted to know, did a bunch of commoners get the nerve to think they could create a hotel that would become, as one of its publicity brochures claimed, “London’s foremost address for discriminating travelers”? London, after all, was the hotel capital of the world, home to such five-star institutions as the Ritz, the Savoy, the Connaught, and Claridge’s. Some had been operating long before Dallas even existed. More than a few critics wondered if the Lanesborough would become a British version of Southfork Ranch—or, as the Evening Standard put it, “a soap star’s mansion.”
In the international hotel industry, a number of elite hoteliers were also dumbfounded that the management contract of the most coveted new luxury hotel property in Europe was given to an unknown Dallas company called Rosewood Hotels and Resorts. It was known that Rosewood owned and operated two Dallas hotels, the Mansion on Turtle Creek and Hotel Crescent Court. Both regularly chalked up awards in the United States. But so what? This was England—and what did Rosewood know about England?
“Ah, yes,” sighed Rosewood president Atef Mankarios as he sat one afternoon in his office near downtown Dallas. He adjusted one of the sleeves of his perfectly tailored Versace suit. “Everyone still thinks we’re a bunch of cutthroat cowboys and oilmen.”
Frankly, I too had to wonder how a group of young Texas baby boomers—Mankarios, at age 43, is the eldest of Rosewood’s eighteen executives—won the rights to run a hotel five thousand miles away, one block from Buckingham Palace, the home of kings and queens. After spending an afternoon at the Rosewood offices, watching buttoned-down workaholics sip Diet Cokes and say things to one another like “Hey, FYI, we got new sales figures coming in today,” I decided I had to visit the Lanesborough. The hotel was about to throw a critically important party for some of the most prestigious members of London society and royalty. I wanted to see how they would react.
In Dallas society, of course, Rosewood is treated with almost godlike reverence. With part of the money she received as beneficiary of a trust established by her late father, oilman H. L. Hunt, Caroline Rose Hunt founded the company in 1979 to create small, elegant hotels. Her first effort was the Mansion on Turtle Creek, which garnered a national reputation: It received the coveted Mobil Travel Guide Five Star Award in 1990, and last year it was named by the U.S. Zagat survey as the best hotel in the country. The always-packed Mansion Restaurant alone has taught the sometimes rowdy Dallas rich more about fine wine and haute cuisine than any other establishment in the history of the city. Social climbers have been known to bribe the maître d’ to be seated at the restaurant’s highly visible front tables.
In the mid-eighties, Rosewood expanded to acquire the famous Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, the Hotel Hana-Maui in Hawaii, and the Remington in Houston, but after selling all three a few years later, the company seemed to retrench to its Dallas roots. The dapper, ambitious Atef Mankarios, however, had other ideas. Born in Egypt, Mankarios began working as a night concierge at a tiny one-star Paris hotel when he was 22. He worked in hotels throughout Europe, moved to the U.S. to work for the Four Seasons company, then was hired as the Mansion’s resident manager in 1985. In 1989 he was named Rosewood’s president, and right away he started looking for internationally prominent hotels for Rosewood to manage (though not necessarily to purchase).
Almost immediately, he had his chance. In October 1989 a consortium from the Middle Eastern sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, which had bought the old St. George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner, announced it wanted to turn the building into the most renowned hotel in London. Money was no object. Suddenly, every great hotelier in the world was bidding for the project. In all, 42 hotel companies—among them such well-known names as Ritz-Carlton, Kempinski, Inter-Continental, Regent, Peninsula, Mandarin Oriental—made pitches to win the contract.
Rosewood was so far removed from the international scene that Mankarios didn’t even hear about the London project until three days before the bids were to close. Frantic, he and a vice president flew to London to give a one-hour slide presentation to the owners’ representatives. The reps had only vaguely heard of Rosewood’s hotels; the name “Caroline Hunt” meant nothing to them. But Mankarios talked about the company’s excellence. He said he wanted to create London’s first “six-star” hotel. In a spontaneous (some might say slightly crazed) burst of inspiration, he added that he wanted each guest to have his or her own English butler. No other London hotel provided a butler for all of its guests. The owners were duly impressed. A few weeks later, Rosewood was named as one of the seven hotel companies still in the running. Each was told to report back in a month with a full presentation on its ideas for the London hotel.
Rosewood was considered a long shot. It was the only American company that had made the cut; the favorites were long-established firms from Europe or the Far East. Nevertheless, for two days, Man-karios visited twenty top London hotels, peering into rooms, taking notes. Back in Dallas, he gathered his staff for daily seven-in-the-morning brainstorming meetings. Trained in the big American hotel chains, his team had little experience working in European hotels.
Mankarios, however, is one of those people who is obsessed, day and night, with creating the perfect hotel. In his coat pocket he keeps a running list of ways to make hotels better. For all his charm, he is one of the most fastidious men alive—temperamental, a stickler for detail. If he finds one burned-out light bulb in the lobby of one of his hotels, he will go into a small rage, calling the general manager, demanding to know why such a catastrophe has occurred. “If you are my employee and you are not doing well,” he said, explaining his management style, “I’ll come after you. I’ll keep kicking your butt until it hurts.”
Mankarios also has a weird genius for the luxury hotel business. To the uninitiated, every luxury hotel looks grand: There are chocolates on the bed pillows, an extra phone in the bathroom, 24-hour room service, free movies on the television. But for executives like Mankarios, hotel luxury is determined by such minutiae as the fluffiness of the towels, the quality of the marble in the bathrooms, and the thread count of the cotton sheets. Mankarios and his staff debate whether guests’ bathrobes should draw to the left or to the right. He and his creative alter ego at Rosewood, James Brackensick, the 36-year-old vice president of purchasing, have literally gotten into arguments about the size of the dining room “show plates,” those ornate plates that sit on the table and then are taken away right before dinner arrives. On the day I visited the boyish, blond-haired Brackensick, his desk was piled with slippers. “Atef wants the ideal bedroom slipper for the Lanesborough, and everything I’ve shown him he hates,” Brackensick said with a pained expression. “The man is absolutely stubborn.”
With the Lanesborough project, Mankarios got the opportunity to address every pet peeve he harbored about hotels. Because he hated registration desks in hotel lobbies, he decided the Lanesborough should get all the information about guests over the phone before check-in so they could go straight to their rooms. Because it irritated him to call different hotel numbers to reach room service and housekeeping, he decided a guest should have to push only one button to call a butler, who would do everything that was necessary. Because he hated mini-bars (“Those little airline bottles make me crazy”), he wanted crystal decanters filled with different liquors in each room. Because he didn’t like maids inconveniently knocking on his door while he was in his room, he wanted to install electronic motion detectors so that housekeeping would know only to come to the room when the guest was out.
Mankarios also wanted each room to have a private phone line and its own fax machine. He wanted the hotel to provide a 24-hour secretarial service and to print business cards for each guest. He announced that each room should have a climate-control system—a computerized operation that adjusts the temperature and turns off the lights in the room immediately after a guest leaves and then automatically restores the temperature and turns the lights back on when the guest returns. He said the hotel should keep a computerized file on each guest, noting the guest’s preference in everything from wine to music; if an employee overhears the guest say his pillows are too soft, the information is input into the computer so that harder pillows will be provided for the guest the next time he checks in.
As opposed to the other companies who made presentations to the Lanesborough’s owners, Mankarios arrived in London with three leather-bound brief-ing books that described precisely how Rosewood would run the hotel. From the dining room cuisine to the housekeepers’ and limousine drivers’ duties, from the cost of the rooms to what exactly would be in them—it was all there. “What impressed us most,” said John S. Borner, a partner in the London consulting firm that evaluated the competing presentations, “was that Rosewood had presented us with a plan for the most technologically advanced hotel in the world.”
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