Tablet10: Amangiri

The latest issue of our Tablet10 magazine is here. Each week we’ll be spotlighting a different hotel from Volume 9. After last week’s focus on the very urban Ace Hotel New York, we’re going on the road with Amangiri, a fortress of luxury set in the majestic southern Utah desert. No Stumptown, but we think you’ll find plenty of other redeeming qualities.

The best possible result, for a hotel chain, is for the name to become synonymous with the experience. That’s the situation Amanresorts finds itself in. The group’s small-scale, big-luxury hotels set the agenda for the high end of the hospitality world, and the only variables are in the details of the individual hotels — especially the location.

This is where Amangiri is truly unique. It’s in southern Utah, just a minute or two from the Arizona border. But it’s most likely not the Utah you’re thinking of. Amangiri’s setting is less like the Salt Lake suburbia of Big Love and more like the desert canyon habitat from the Road Runner cartoons.

The new Tablet10 takes an in-depth photographic look at this singular property, and features an interview with the architects responsible for the building’s sublime forms. Here’s an online bonus—an interview with Bernt Kuhlmann, whose Lifestyle Resort Solutions originally developed Amangiri.

Tablet: You worked for ten years on this project.

Bernt Kuhlmann: We bought the property in ’99, so in fact it’s in its eleventh year.

What were your plans at that point?

At the time when we purchased the property, I was a managing partner at another property that my business partner and I owned at the time, Dunton Hot Springs. In 1998 we opened Dunton to the public and we had a lot of success. And so Christoph Henkel, my business partner, and myself, we decided that since we really liked the Four Corners region we would look for another property that would be closer to all those great national parks.

What was the concept?

I noticed that a lot of the hotels, motels and lodges either were built a long time ago, so they’re pretty dated, or they’re pretty simple. Oftentimes you end up spending the night in a hotel with a window that goes out to the parking lot. So we started looking for land, and I drove around for about six months in southern Utah and southern Colorado and northern Arizona, trying to find the right piece of land. It wasn’t that easy.

At some point I got a call from a little old lady from Page. She told me that she thought that she had what we were looking for. You can imagine what happened when I first laid eyes on it.

It seems incredible that it was private land.

Of course it’s not as easy as that. The site where the hotel is built was a national park at that time. It was on Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Fortunately, though, we had a piece of land that the Department of the Interior had its eye on. It was a flat piece of land on the other side of the highway that’s in the viewshed of Lake Powell. Let’s say we had sold that land to a local company and they had built boat storage on that land — you would have had an eyesore. That’s what the Department of the Interior wanted to avoid — they wanted to keep the views unobstructed. So it was quite valuable to the Department of the Interior. At the same time we had our eye on the land where the hotel is now, which was practically surrounded by lands we already controlled.

So the public didn’t really have any access to it. And when we applied for the land swap, it was sort of a no-brainer. It still took three years, and it still had to become a Congressional act, it still had to be signed by the President. But in the end it was one of those situations where everybody got what they wanted. It was a win-win situation.

It’s a very Western story. Only here are there places like this that could still be available.

As far as I’m concerned — I’ve been living in the West, I lived in Dunton Hot Springs when we were restoring it. I brought in all those log cabins, and traveled all around southern Utah and Colorado and Arizona, and I always thought that, going into the future, the greatest luxury these days is open space.

And it happens that the area where Amangiri is located, the density of population is incredibly small. So we really didn’t have much of a choice but to build a very exclusive hotel where the return would come from a high-end customer, from a high-end visitor. And when we narrowed it down to that segment, we realized that we really needed someone like Aman, and there aren’t really many companies like Aman out there.

Arguably there’s only one.

We had to approach them. Eventually I sent them some imagery and we met somebody who gave us an introduction there. Adrian Zecha, the chairman of Aman, he was sufficiently interested, so at his next visit in the United States he went to see us.

He’s an amazing guy. He went to see this property, and within fifteen minutes he simply said “Okay, this will do.” I thought he would want to drive around. He took a look at the place, asked us a few questions, but basically that was it. This man has a very strong intuition and instinct.

Then of course the architecture comes in. We felt very strongly that we shouldn’t associate the architecture with any ethnic culture or look, such as Santa Fe or Mediterranean or whatever. We felt that the American desert of the Southwest has a great tradition with contemporary architecture. The desert is all about less is more, and being purist. So we were lucky to end up with three architects who actually agreed to work as a team on this. Marwan Al-Sayed, Rick Joy and Wendell Burnette.

I think what they succeeded in doing here is to create a hotel that has a stark appearance from the outside, but when you go into the rooms or the other spaces, it’s very warm, it feels very welcoming. The soft core in the hard shell.

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