Why best hotel in the world designer Bill Bensley now faces his most ambitious project
If you feel a distinct joie de vivre walking into a Bill Bensley-designed establishment, that’s exactly what its maker intended.
Throughout the more than 30 years since he started his eponymous design studio Bensley in a Bangkok garage, work has been “all about play” for the architect, landscaper and interior designer who trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He and his team of more than 100 are a maverick bunch, living by the motto: if it’s not fun, don’t do it.
Wild ideas? Bring them on!
We’re on a Zoom call to discuss his latest book, More Escapism, published by Thames & Hudson. A lengthy tome of 500-odd pages and weighing 5.5kg (12lb), it’s a glorious, page-turning photo essay chronicling the 12 most recent projects of the world-renowned hotel designer, whose “crazy” mind has conjured up more than 200 whimsical and fantastical properties in 30-plus countries.
And he’s excited. Why? Because that book has just landed him his most ambitious project yet, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A staunch conservationist and animal lover, Bensley has planted jungles in barren wasteland, saved national parks from mining, and taken on poachers in their own territory.
He’d just returned to Bangkok from South Africa, where he had pitched to a wealthy philanthropic family wanting to do a conservation project in the Congo rainforest. Pygmies live there, he explains, but so, too, do endangered mountain gorillas being slaughtered for meat, considered a delicacy in some circles. Covid-related job losses have exacerbated the problem.
Bensley wants to repeat what he’s done at Shinta Mani Wild in Cambodia: assemble a posse of wildlife rangers who hunt the poachers 24/7, bringing paying guests in on the experience.
Accessing the Congo site means a 10km (6-mile) hike – no motorised vehicles are allowed, and that also applies to bringing in all the materials needed to create his envisaged resort with just six rooms, where he expects like-minded guests will pay US$4,000 a night.
“It’s very small, low-impact tourism, but with high yield,” he says. He hopes to complete the project within two years.
Being vetted was a new experience for the much-courted designer (“I never get interviewed for jobs,” he explains), so he took along a copy of More Escapism, by way of a CV, to show Sabine Plattner. Plattner is the founder of Congo Conservation – the largest privately funded conservation-commerce company in the Congo Basin – and helms the Germany-based Hasso Plattner Foundation, supporting a range of foundations and NGOs globally.
For a good 30 minutes, Plattner turned the pages, slowly and wordlessly, Bensley says. “Finally, she stared straight into my face and said ‘Bill, you really are an artist, aren’t you?’ Without that book, she couldn’t have seen so deeply into my soul.”
Transporting the reader into Bensley’s world begins with an expose of his own home, Baan Botanica, an exotic wonderland the US-born designer shares with his Thai horticulturalist husband, Jirachai Rengthong.
“If you put yourself in a vulnerable position [by showing your own house], then perhaps the rest of the book will make more sense,” he says.
When you can tear your eyes away from the mesmerising photography, the text explains much – such as why uber-luxe tented camps dominate his designs of late.
It began with his first foray into the scene, the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle, in Thailand, which opened in early 2006.
“By definition, [tents are] impermanent. And I like building with impermanent, lightweight structures,” he says. “They in a way tip-toe across the landscape. If you put four columns down, and a tent above that, it leaves the natural drainage systems of the land, and the patterns of animals moving through the forest, to be undisturbed.”
To date, Bensley’s studio has created four tented camps: Shinta Mani Wild, Capella Ubud in Bali, the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle, and Rosewood Luang Prabang in Laos, all of them included in the book.
The book also sheds light on the storylines Bensley’s feverish imagination weaves into each design to bring his projects to life.
At Capella Ubud, which opened in July 2018, the narrative behind its 22 tents hidden in the jungle pays homage to Balinese people persecuted by the first foreign settlers to the island in the 1800s.
The Dutch, when they colonised Indonesia, would send ships from Jakarta to take slaves from Bali. “The Balinese fought back,” he says. “This camp is a celebration of their tenacity.”
The decor of each tent reflects the people who might have stayed there: the camp major, the explorer, the cartographer, and so on. In 2020, Capella Ubud was voted Travel and Leisure’s best hotel in the world.
The book also shows how it is possible to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.
Being steps away from Vietnam’s iconic Hanoi Opera House, Bensley’s Capella Hanoi, which opened in 2021, has a storyline that follows a theatrical theme. The 47-room hotel, a one-time house of ill repute, has become famous for its opulent interiors – a perfect Roaring Twenties pied-à-terre for the singers, dancers, composers and designers who would have caroused there.
However, the pool area was in the basem*nt – a “lightless, low-ceilinged space with more than a few other constraints”, Bensley says. Characteristically, he transformed it into a dizzying Grecian aquatic fantasy. “It’s all smoke, lights and mirrors,” he confides. “We had to get some serious Houdini-ism going on in there.”
To the Bensley cohort, doing the wildest thing also means doing the right thing, its founder says.
To save a precious piece of Cambodian national park from titanium mining, Bensley and a business partner bought the lease for 865 acres, built Shinta Mani Wild without cutting down any trees, and joined forces with Cambodian NGO Wildlife Alliance. Bensley says the most popular activity for guests who zip line in for a luxury tented camping experience is to join the aforementioned anti-poaching squad on their nightly patrols, often catching the culprits red-handed.
At the Four Seasons Tented Camp Golden Triangle, he set about “healing the land” for the site that was previously a quarry. The crater became a beautiful pond and the land beside it a rice paddy, with jungle planted in rings around the guest villas. Twelve years after the resort’s opening, Bensley still finds it hard to believe that this oasis abundant with flora and fauna hasn’t always existed.
On Emerald Bay in Phu Quoc, Vietnam, Bensley resurrected an abandoned French tertiary campus to create a JW Marriott hotel where all common rooms are repurposed academic departments. Going by the nickname Lamarck University, the hotel features an auditorium filled with vintage atlases, a gym with inscribed trophies, and as guests check in they’re presented with study schedules that, happily, are optional.
Perhaps as a nod to his time living in Hong Kong (from 1987-89), meals are served in the glamorous Pink Pearl dining room, helmed by Pearl, the Cantonese wife of the institution’s first dean.
We have enough stuff on earth to build as many hotels as we like for the next 20 years at least, without having to make anything new. Why did we become so wasteful?
This time, though, it’s all make-believe. No university ever existed on the site. But so authentic is the delivery of the tale that, according to its creator, 99 per cent of the guests are convinced it is true.
“I had a story about every single building – why I built it, its previous life – I laid it on for them real thick,” he says. Why? “Because when people go on vacation they want to escape. That’s why my books are called Escapism.” (More Escapism follows Escapism, published in 2016.)
Filling his hotels with realistic artefacts is one of life’s joys for Bensley, who loves poking around Parisian flea markets and has a truck follow him to boot and barn sales across the UK Midlands.
“I’m a shopaholic. I buy first and think later,” he says. He’s also a committed repurposer: a billiard table becomes a bed, and then a dining table, for instance.
Just before our chat, philanthropist Plattner called to give Bensley the go-ahead for the Congo project. He’s thrilled, because it’s something he’s always wanted to do. But there remains at least one unfulfilled ambition for the 63-year-old designer.
“We have enough stuff on earth to build as many hotels as we like for the next 20 years at least, without having to make anything new,” he says. “Why did we become so wasteful? We should be renovating and repurposing much more.”
The next big project Bensley has in mind would use 100 per cent upcycled materials. So far, there have been no takers.
“People are interested to let me do it,” he says, “but I haven’t been able to land the job – yet.”
