Boutique Design | boutiquedesign.com

(January / February 2012) posted on Wed Feb 15, 2012

Worlds Apart: Bilkey Llinas Design simultaneously creates a pair of Four Seasons hotels in the U.S. and China.

By Matthew Hall

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Four Seasons brand was born just over 50 years ago, when Isadore “Issy” Sharp opened what he describes as “a modest motor hotel” in downtown Toronto. The hotelier has since blossomed into a global luxury brand, with 85 locales in 35 countries. As part of its ongoing expansion, the company recently hired Bilkey Llinas Design (BLD) to create the interiors for two far-flung hotels at the same time—one in Denver, the other in Hangzhou, China. In addition to being separated by 6,800 miles and more than a dozen time zones, the two projects were very different in scale and settings.

The Denver Four Seasons is a vertical, urban affair, with 239 guest rooms and suites housed within an ultra-modern, 45-story, mixed-use skyscraper that offers vistas of the nearby Rocky Mountains. The Chinese hotel, by contrast, consists of 78 guest rooms and three villas ensconced in pagoda-style pavilions, spread out over nine acres on the shores of Hangzhou’s picturesque West Lake.

That BLD was able to nab two such disparate projects is testament to the track record it established in recent years with Four Seasons. BLD—which was launched in 1989 by Robert Bilkey, Oscar Llinas and Mauricio Salcedo and has offices in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and Hong Kong—has worked for a variety of high-profile hotel flags over the years, including Hyatt, Hilton and InterContinental.

However, its first project for Four Seasons didn’t come until 2003, when the firm designed branded apartments for the company in Hong Kong, followed by a Four Seasons hotel in Mumbai. That work, Salcedo notes, helped land BLD on Four Seasons’ coveted preferred-designer list, a status the firm parlayed into winning proposals for the Denver and Hangzhou projects.

For all the differences between those two hotels, Salcedo notes that both share the Four Seasons brand’s desire to create destinations that “are equal parts elegance and a sophisticated sense of place.” At the Denver locale, whose design was overseen by Salcedo, Denis Mulhern and their design team at BLD’s Florida office, that involved creating interiors that avoided the stereotypical “cabin look” often found at destinations in the Western U.S., says Salcedo.

One of the main ways designers sought to accomplish that was by using stacked stone (from the aptly named Stone Mountain collection by Walker Zanger) on the feature walls of the guest rooms and bathrooms. In addition, the guest rooms were equipped with oversized windows to take advantage of the view. The hotel’s public spaces are home to such features as a large, two-sided fireplace that serves as the focal point of the lobby, and more than 1,000 paintings and sculptures by Colorado artists.

The design of the Four Seasons in Hangzhou, meantime, was overseen by Bilkey, Llinas and Xin Ouyang from their base in Hong Kong. At that hotel, the BLD team sought to create a design that engendered “a sense of visual harmony between the hotel’s very traditional exterior of peaked-roof pavilions and the contemporary interiors that are an integral part of the Four Seasons experience,” says Bilkey.

To that end, designers populated the hotel’s guest room interiors with light stone, warm woods and earth colors. The idea, Bilkey explains, was to create “a feeling of oneness” with the lush gardens that surround the hotel (and are highly visible from its large, traditional windows). 

Now that it’s finished with the above pair of projects for Four Seasons, BLD has moved on to begin working on other commissions for the company, including a branded residence development in Beijing.