Landscaping the luxury experience

In today’s time-poor world, the demand for luxury travel is becoming ever more intensive. Global luxury brands such as Versace and Bvlgari are opening their own resorts. Exclusive members’ clubs and concierge services like Mr & Mrs Smith and Nota Bene exist in large part to introduce their high-powered clientele to elite and luxurious resorts.

At the heart of any luxury experience, from fashion to restaurants, lie two key elements: authenticity and exclusivity. And for international hotels, which cater to a discerning and demanding client base, many of whom travel internationally and luxuriously as part of their working lives, the landscape is key to both authenticity and exclusivity.
It is quality landscape design that creates the elusive sense of place which defines the guest experience, embedding the hotel within the local climate, flora, fauna and, importantly, culture, making it authentic, real, and honest.

A well designed landscape creates an environment that entices the guest on first viewing and draws them deeper into the world of the resort. At the micro-level, it creates unique spaces the guest can personalise for themselves. At the macro-level, it provides dramatic vistas that open up into the world around them.

In any resort, the guest spends far much more of their time in the landscape than in their room or suite. And landscape shapes the guest experience and helps create their mood.

Calm, zen-style spaces offer the opportunity for guests to reflect, contemplate, relax or even meditate. Dynamic pools with cascading waterfalls provide an invitation to play. Dazzling sunset vistas take the dining experience to a whole new level.

But there is more to it than that. It should go without saying that service is critical to the luxury experience. Effective landscape design enables luxury hotels to maintain their high staffing levels and deliver their intensely personal service with maximum discretion. Landscape design drives this exclusivity, maintaining the sense of privacy and intimacy, while staff, move freely and unobtrusively from place to place.
Great landscape design appeals to, and awakes, every single sense. The scent of bougainvillea or frangipani. The touch of soft grass or warm sand underfoot. The rustle of date palms in the breeze and the ripple of cool water over stone. The razor edges of a turquoise pool soaring to meet the blue horizon, or gnarled olive trees framing a mountain landscape. The taste of fresh coconut slashed from a palm on the waterfront. These experiences engage guests on all levels, not the visual. Great landscape design uses literally everything around it, from native species to natural stones, to create a strong, coherent design which unifies and transforms the resort. Whether resting, playing, or even catching up on work, urban travellers can benefit from open tranquil spaces that are often missing from their everyday lives.

As the gardener and novelist Vita Sackville-West remarked, “Travel is the most private of pleasures,” and it is landscape design, whether crafting intimate nooks into a natural lagoon, designing private infinity pools framed by walls of tropical flowers, or creating gardens of incredible tranquillity in which to stroll, that transforms the pleasurable into the private.

FIVE LUXURIOUS LANDSCAPES TO LOOK OUT FOR....

AMIRANDES – CRETE
Interlocking tranquil courtyards, colonnades and dazzling island vistas create a breathtaking fusion between internal and external public spaces. Framed by evergreens, olives, date palms and carobs and employing local dark stone, the landscape pays homage to traditional Cretan character whilst providing exciting and dramatic settings for indoor and outdoor dining.

ROYAL MIRAGE – DUBAI
An outstanding example of a themed resort, using traditional Arabian design vocabulary to play on the notion of a desert fort, beautifully stylised with highly effective detailing. It is built around a stunning, highly photographed, formal lagoon pool set in an oasis of 1300 date palms. Tiled floors, curving archways and diffused lighting from lanterns and torches inside and outside create continuity.

AMANJENA – MARRAKECH
The whole resort is set around a gigantic water basin, a true oasis that provides a dramatic reflection of palm trees. The overriding vocabulary is Moorish in style, yet an axial approach to the layout creates striking vistas that are easily identifiable, providing the guest with ease of movement throughout the hotel.  Rills and pools adorn the public spaces.

FOUR SEASONS UBUD BALI
In the tropics, buildings are often open to the elements, so a seamless link from interior to landscape is critical. Dramatic architectural forms blend seamlessly with the tropical rainforest valley. Tropical vines cling to the façade, coconut palms spring from spaces between the buildings, and the central pool appears at one with the river which gushes nearby. A mystical staircase draws guests down into the open lobby space with views deep into the rainforest opposite.

THE BALE – NUSA DUA BALI
A restricted palate of materials and common detailing creates a real sense of place. Smooth Indonesian stone and rough local limestone run throughout, and rills tumble in cascades onto beds of stones or green tiles. Minimalist, architectural planting relies on grasses, reeds, cacti and frangipani trees, softened by flower arrangements, aromas, sculptures and decorative candles.