Carrie & Alex Vik

We interviewed Carrie and Alex Vik, the co-owners of the Estancia Vik José Ignacio, on the occasion of their hotel’s inclusion in Volume 8 of our Tablet10 series. Here, in an online exclusive, is the full text of the interview.

What’s the concept behind the Estancia Vik?

Alex: We wanted to do something that highlighted how beautiful this part of Uruguay is, and all the tremendous things that they have when it comes to art, architecture, design and nature. Almost like an homage to Uruguay. We wanted something that we could use when we’re down there with our family, our cousins, uncles and aunts, and when we’re not there, to share with everybody.

So that’s why we made it into a hotel. It’s really what we think of as beyond a hotel. It’s something different, more like a friend’s property than a hotel. And you would be received not as a hotel guest but as an old friend or somebody who’s a guest in someone’s house.

What was it that drew you to the location?

Alex: It’s a very cool place. Very beautiful. What I call “Marlboro Country.” It’s like being in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but it’s three kilometers from the beach, which represents St. Tropez or Malibu or something like that, where you can go from the rustic countryside, get on your horse, and ride down to the beach at St. Tropez. Restaurants, art galleries, a whole other world.

Carrie: We started going to Uruguay over twenty years ago. Alex’s mother was Uruguayan, and he’d never been there, and we’d had our first child, and his grandmother was still alive, so we wanted to see what it was all about, and connect with his family down there. And we fell in love with Uruguay. We fell in love with the culture, and then of course because we’re interested in design and architecture we started looking at houses. We started going to galleries, meeting artists, and buying some art. And that just started this process of getting to know the artists, the art world that the rest of the world — it’s sort of an undiscovered art world, in terms of our northern hemisphere art world.

You’ve got the ability to have a 4,000-acre ranch right next to, as Alex said, St. Tropez of forty years ago. Pristine beaches, fabulous nightlife, restaurants, right within easy proximity. It’s sort of unique in the world.

Some people are uncomfortable with labels like “design hotel” or “art hotel,” but the Estancia combines elements of both.

Alex: Those are elements of it, for sure. But it’s about the setting. The setting is grand and amazing and beautiful. And then it’s about keeping nature pristine. Being very green: producing all of our own electricity, our own water, heating, everything as green as we can. So it’s all about the concept of integrating into nature. Outside of the wall, everything is untouched. There’s cattle walking around, horses, ostrich, sheep, foxes.

Carrie: We struggle with the concept of a “hotel.” Like Alex said, it’s a different experience than going to a hotel.

Are there hotels that you like?

Alex: We definitely have hotels we really like, but here we tried to take the hotel experience to another level, which we really haven’t found in the world. Last year we were in Japan and we stayed at the Peninsula in Tokyo. Magnificent, beautiful hotel, incredible design. But it’s a hotel.

The Baur au Lac in Zürich is beautiful, I know the manager, they treat me beautifully. There are many like that in the world. But there are very few where you can stay in somebody’s house, and be treated at another level. The art is personal, and it’s real, and so is the furniture, the china. It’s just a different thing.

Carrie: It also comes from our experience traveling with friends. You go with three or four families, and you try staying in a hotel. It doesn’t really work. You can’t come together like you can in a private home. And yet when you rent a private home, one couple gets a great master bedroom suite, and the other couple has a much lesser accommodation.

That also is part of the driving force for creating what we did, where you have these four beautiful master suites, and eight smaller but still very big suites. You can have a lot of families come together. At New Year’s we had thirty-two people staying there, maybe five different families. But everybody had wonderful accommodations, and we had that great living room to get together, the big dining room to have dinners and lunches, and to hang out at the pool, and hang out in various spaces. It just works so well. It’s so much nicer than staying in a hotel.

How did the art collection come about?

Alex: We wanted something traditional. Carrie and I, we always liked the traditional courtyards that they have in the estancias. Traditional estancias, they were almost like fortresses. The outside wall was like a fortress wall.

We sort of took this to another level. The outside is completely wild, and we haven’t touched a thing. The inside is very refined, and we’ve been friendly with many artists in Uruguay for many years, and we think of them as very talented, and a little bit out of the global mainstream, which makes it more interesting. We started working with them, and more and more of them got excited, they heard about this crazy guy who wanted to do this crazy thing, and after a while it spread throughout the community, and we would get calls from all these artists.

There are art hotels all over the world, but your collection is very focused, and very unique.

Alex: That’s what makes it so interesting. These are contemporary artists, anywhere from late twenties to 75. But they’ve been molded by different experiences in Uruguay, it’s a different culture. And here we give them an opportunity to do something they never do, and that in itself created some new ideas.

For example, we have one barbecue room, and it was our idea to take the ancient poor gaucho, with his shack of corrugated tin that he would put together, like a barn, and he would cook his food in there. We had seen that, and we thought, if we did that inside an existing structure, and then painted on it, it will be rustic and yet very contemporary, because it will resonate with graffiti on New York storefronts or subway cars.

Carrie: [Marcelo] Legrand, who painted this barbecue, that’s his style. Very chaotic, very interesting, and you see more and more every time you look at it. It is his style, but it combines something of an ancient nature and culture of Uruguay with something very contemporary.

Do you think you enjoy the planning and the creation or the operation?

Carrie: Definitely the creation of it. It’s fun to kind of develop the marketing, and the P.R. has been fabulous, but I think for us the creative side.

Alex: When we go, we’re just another guest. Actually, we’re leaving tonight to go down there. We’ll be spending a week there, and there’ll be other guests there, but we’ll be guests.

Carrie: We’ve hired a professional. Max Broquen is a professional hotel manager. We’ve sort of handed it over to him.

Alex: We’ve created the physical environment for you to really enjoy yourself and have a great time, and what he is doing really well is creating an experience. You go down there and you have what we call an “experience concierge,” so someone will organize your stay — where to go, what to do — and receive you like your old friend. I think that’s as important as the physical environment — that you’re well received and you feel at home.