Source : telegraph.co.uk
Category : Luxury Hotels In San Diego
By : CLAIRE WRATHALL
Posted By : Hotels in Virginia Beach North Courtyard
There is a school of thought that if you find an ideal holiday destination – a hotel or a villa that comes close to your idea of perfection – you should put from your mind the fact that there’s a whole world out there to explore, and keep going back year after year. Indeed, small exclusive hotel companies are developing property collections to nurture this very concept – to provide a hotel to meet their clientele’s every holiday desire, whether it’s for sun and sea, skiing or sightseeing – each, of course, in the same signature luxurious surroundings. Spend a few days at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc near Antibes, for instance, and I’d challenge you not to want to return as often as you could. It’s hard to pinpoint quite what gives it its allure. It goes without saying that the 19th-century villa, all tall mansards, oeil-de-boeuf windows and wrought-iron balconies, is beautiful; that its sumptuous rooms are supremely comfortable; and that the avuncular staff will treat you like royals. Perhaps it’s the view from the veranda, down the central allée that bisects with immaculate gardens, out across the glittering Bay of Cannes. Or the complete sense of bien-être that sipping a Bellini here engenders after a day spent lazing by the huge heated saltwater infinity pool or lunching languorously in one of the secluded waterfront cabanas, followed by a bracing swim out of one of the sunbathing pontoons.
Chat to your soigné fellow guests – French, American, German or British – and you’ll find many who came here as children and who return annually. They’re mostly au fait with the hotel’s sister establishments – in Paris, Provence and Baden-Baden. And such is their loyalty to the Oetker Collection of hotels, a still small privately owned company, that this winter, my hunch is they’ll be spending New Year in the Seychelles, on Frégate Island. If they are skiers, I’d hazard that they’ve also made bookings at L’Apogée in Courchevel. For the Oetker Collection is expanding at some speed. Until last year it consisted of just four hotels. By Christmas there’ll be nine. All hoteliers love return guests; there is no greater compliment or endorsement. But though of course loyalty to a single hotel doesn’t guarantee loyalty to a brand, there is a good chance that if you love a hotel, you’ll also find content at its sister establishments. Hence Oetker’s ambition to create a collection of hotels that cater to all its core clientele’s key travel needs – summer, winter, long haul, short haul, rural and city – and engenders the same loyalty. "Next we’d like to complement our current portfolio with two or three key city destinations: New York and London, for example," says its CEO, Frank Marrenbach. His plan is have 15 to 20 hotels under Oetker management by 2020. "Beyond that there’s a limit to the number we would want because individuality is important to us, and we don’t want to go beyond our ability to run complex distinctive hotels," he adds, stressing that each hotel needs a particular identity, its own look and feel.
L’Apogée – its name as redolent of its high-altitude ski-in, ski-out location in Courchevel 1850 as its lofty ideals of sybaritism – is a chalet built from scratch with 33 suites, 20 rooms and a spectacular penthouse, decorated by Joseph Dirand and India Mahdavi (she of the seductively stylish Coburg Bar at London’s Connaught). All the usual hotel attributes pertain: Yannick Franques, who holds two Michelin stars at Château de Saint-Martin, is overseeing the kitchen. The spa contains not just the usual pools and gadgets but an authentic Russian banya. And of course it practically goes without saying that the hotel has its own private ski lift. In light of this, one might assume a certain nervousness on the part of its chief rival in Courchevel 1850, Cheval Blanc, the first venture into hotel-keeping by Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which opened in 2005. Mais au contraire, for LVMH is not just confident that what it has to offer is at the acme of style, comfort and attentive service, but it too is building a hotel brand to cater for every sort of holiday, hence its first tropical resort, Cheval Blanc Randheli, which opens in the Maldives on November 1. Last summer LVMH also acquired the Hotel Saint-Barth Isle de France on St Barts in the Caribbean, until then part, as it happened, of the Oetker portfolio.
Another small French independent, Maison & Hotels Sibhuet, best known for its flagship five-star Les Fermes de Marie in the ski resort of Megève, continued the trend this summer when it opened the every-bit-as-alluring Domaine de la Baume, a summer hideaway near Tourtour in Provence. And the trend is not restricted to France. Take the Marbella Club in southern Spain, which opened in 1954, making it the most venerable, not to mention the grandest hotel on the Costa del Sol. Like the Hôtel du Cap, the archetypal jet-set haunt became a magnet for the glitterati. Cast your eye over the hotels’ guest books and you’ll see several names duplicated: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Princess Grace of Monaco, James Stewart, Gina Lollabrigida, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Sean Connery… And like the Hôtel du Cap, it knows its guests like to ski in winter. Its founder, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, a German artistocrat drawn to that coast by his passion for powerboat racing, was a keen skier. "He always wanted a Marbella Club in the Sierra Nevada so that he and his friends could ski and play golf the same day, or the same weekend," says the hotel’s general manager Franck Sibille.
Last winter that dream became a reality when El Lodge opened, a two-hour drive away in the ski resort of Monachil. Though its core standards, values and many of the staff remain the same, it’s an entirely different proposition from the Marbella Club. Where the Marbella Club is very much a beach resort, El Lodge is the quintessential wooden chalet, its 20 guest rooms and public areas furnished (by the British designer Andrew Martin) with antler chandeliers, faux-fur throws, sheepskins and cowhide rugs. Not that this means they’ve taken their eye off the mother hotel, as it were. In anticipation of next year’s 60th anniversary, there is an ongoing major overhaul of all 121 rooms and suites by Jean Pierre Martel and Kamini Ezralowl; its already exemplary spa has been redesigned and refitted and in August the €30,000-a-night Villa del Mar opened after a wholesale renovation right on the beach. Perhaps inevitably all this has whetted an appetite for further expansion, to which end the Marbella Club’s owner, Daniel Shamoon, now has Bora Bora, Ibiza and London in his sights. An eclectic range of destinations, perhaps, but one that ensures whether it’s skiing, winter sun or a city break its clientele has in mind, it will have that option covered.
Source:telegraph.co.uk/luxury/travel/11557/sister-act-hotels-groups-that-span-the-seasons.html
