Be remarkable, stand out, capture and captivate your audience

Clint Nagata

In an increasingly online-orientated world, businesses across the board are striving to make themselves and their products or services remarkable, standing out from the competition to capture the ever-decreasing attention span of their audience.

Designers and architects are no different, which is why we constantly strive to weave the essence of each project’s respective location into the build design and masterplanning, allowing us to shake off the chains of rigidly formatted banality to create unique and individual visions reflective of the distinctive character of the project’s surroundings.

We have recently been appointed by Regent Hotels to reimagine the Regent Taipei and to create new city centre hotels in the Chinese cities of Taiyuan and Xian. Our recent designs for the new Regent Phuket and Regent Bali combine timeless tropical modern design inspired by a sense of place with subtle heritage and cultural accents.

Regent Phuket takes its cue from Sino-Portuguese and contemporary Thai colonial-era culture, while the interiors are driven by the modern Asian resort approach, with detailed design that touches on a traditional Thai-Chinese sensibility.

Bespoke works by Thai artists with a nod to Phuket’s past pearl and tin-mining industries – including sea pots, chinaware, and some wall-hung pieces – are wrought in silk, jute, rattan, bamboo and teak, as well as rarer items such as fossilised wood, mother-of-pearl and coral. The elegant, almost Thai colonial feel of the exterior cedes to glowing, flowing interior spaces with warm tonal accents and spectacular back-lit high ceilings.

Developed on a site encompassing 10 acres of tropical gardens with a 200m golden beach, research into the rich artistic and cultural heritage and the spirituality that flows through life on the ‘Island of the Gods’ was key to shaping our vision of Regent Bali.

Delving into indigenous designs on the island was a particularly rewarding and engaging challenge that resulted in our determination to make the bathrooms the real ‘wow factor’ statement, thus the lavish inwardly-focused bathrooms created to be reminiscent of jewellery boxes.

Sometimes however, we have drawn stand out design from an altogether different angle. Our market research into the mindset of what upwardly mobile Chinese travellers regard as true luxury gave rise to a return to elegant classicism and French Riviera glamour with our design of Conrad Sanya Haitang Bay, which scooped the world’s most coveted hotel architectural award from Hospitality Design (HD) magazine last year.

Another of our projects, Doubletree Benxi is located in the east of China’s Liaoning province, a location famous for its natural hot springs and an upcoming area for tourism for the region. Set amidst the breathtaking backdrop of the surrounding mountains and the beautiful Tai Zi River, we committed ourselves to a design which drew inspiration from the site’s natural beauty.

Achieving a design which seamlessly blends nature with architecture was central to the resort’s masterplanning which began by pushing the back of house requirements and public spaces below the level of the arrival court, submerging many of the facilities below the natural ground level to emphasise the existing terrain as well as protecting the interiors from the region’s cold climate throughout 6 months of the year.

Architectural lines merge with the landform allowing guests to arrive to an open expanse and reflective ponds with undisrupted views of the surroundings, while tiers of guestrooms achieve the creation of different views of the landscape’s defining features such as the trees and river creating a cocoon of calm around the spa villas.

As well as geographical inspiration, the project’s design also honours the cultural heritage of its location, featuring a conspicuous origami-inspired roof line that runs across fluidly from the terrain to the project’s peaks and draws the eye; a stand-out landmark that is as much a statement celebrating the region’s culture as it is an iconic structure perfectly offsetting yet perfectly complementing the natural lay of the land.

Today’s design industry is seeing much more importance being placed on individual design and creativity and projects are benefitting because of it, weaving in history, heritage and the environment into designs. Residential projects are very much taking a lead from hospitality on this as they build in many of the features from hotels and resorts creating a much stronger lifestyle experience for owners – who are in turn looking for second homes or investment properties that are much closer to the hospitality experience than ever before.

Be remarkable, stand out, capture and captivate your audience