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HOTELS’ Legend: Peninsula’s Sir Michael Kadoorie

HOTELS introduces its 2017 Legend, Sir Michael Kadoorie. Kadoorie is building on his family’s legacy in business, and its longtime history of philanthropy, with holdings that include Peninsula Hotels. This is the first in a series of profiles of leaders around the world who are challenging the status quo of the hotel industry.

Coming Wednesday: HOTELS’ Groundbreaker, Mama Shelter and Hotel Mob creator Cyril Aouizerate. And read all of our profiles in HOTELS’ April issue.  

 


 

“I’ve been very privileged in many ways in terms of where I find myself,” Sir Michael Kadoorie says. It is soon after sunrise on a February weekday, and he is sitting at a table in the L’oiseau Blanc, the rooftop restaurant of the Peninsula Paris, with Montmartre beyond his right shoulder and the Eiffel Tower at his left.

At 75, he is at the pinnacle of a fortune in business holdings that includes Peninsula Hotels, and at a milepost in a journey begun by his family more than 120 years ago in Baghdad, via Bombay, and finally Shanghai and Hong Kong. His grandfather, Elly Kadoorie, started that journey, and his father and uncle continued it, marking successes, setbacks and world wars that played out at the hotels’ front doors.

The Peninsula Paris was by turns a palace, a hotel, a World War I military hospital and the headquarters, in World War II, of the German high command during the French occupation. Gershwin wrote “An American in Paris” here. Kissinger signed the Paris Peace Accords in what is now the bar. The Hongkong & Shanghai Hotels Limited, which owns Peninsula and of which Kadoorie is chairman, purchased the building as the minority partner with Katara Hospitality and opened it in 2014 after a costly renovation.

History has played out elsewhere: The Shanghai hotel was bombed in the 1930s during China’s war with Japan; the flagship Hong Kong Peninsula was seized by Japanese troops in World War II, and Elly Kadoorie died in 1944 after a two-year internment in prison camp.

“It’s really a fascinating story and a rich story, and a story that’s filled with privilege and despair,” says the hotel company’s chief operating officer, Peter Borer, who joined Peninsula in 1981. “And I think that’s why we’re a company that in all this privilege right now still faces life with great doses of reality and humanity.”

The company’s philanthropic activity is spurred by Sir Michael. “Their family motto is ‘adhere and prosper,’ and that’s very much what we do,” Borer says. “We want to be not just driven by profit, but also by a great chain of human values of recognizing talent, of letting the name, Peninsula, shine and have lots of people behind it that prosper with it.”

Sir Michael Kadoorie stands in front of a full-size replica of L’oiseau Blanc, the 1927 biplane that sits outside its namesake restaurant and suspended over the courtyard at eye level.
Sir Michael Kadoorie stands in front of a full-size replica of L’oiseau Blanc, the 1927 biplane that sits outside its namesake restaurant and suspended over the courtyard at eye level.

Obligation, rewards

“With the privileges come the obligations and the responsibilities, and I’ve been very fortunate in that,” Kadoorie says. “I think probably the most fortunate part of all of this is to have wonderful colleagues, people who know far more than you do… And to be part of that team, it’s very invigorating.” Particularly now, as his “little company” of 10 operating hotels works on three projects in London, Yangon and Istanbul.

He is a non-executive director of CLP Holdings, which supplies power to Hong Kong, and the company’s real estate arm is larger as well. But hotels are tangible. “One has great satisfaction. You meet people. Everyone has different ideas and different thoughts, different cultures, and it’s a challenge but a well worthwhile one.”

His aim: “To be the best in the city that we’re in, and I think everyone collectively tries for about 140% and if we get somewhere around to 80-odd, then hopefully we’re doing a little bit better than someone who’s trying for less and not reaching that amount. But in the end, it’s the guest that measures whether you’re achieving what you should do.” His learning curve has included two takeover bids; now the company controls all its hotels with the exception of Paris and Beverly Hills.

“In the end of the day it’s control,” Kadoorie says. “I think that is a great strength of this company in that everyone believes in the future of it.” 

‘Bleeds Peninsula’

“Everybody there bleeds Peninsula,” says John Miller, a 22-year veteran of Peninsula’s design and planning department. “One of Mr. Kadoorie’s MOs, if you will, is that he believes in a few extremely good projects rather than a great number of ones having compromises. It did mean that people were able to spend a great deal of scrutiny and energy and passion in each project, and that all came from him.” And, adds Miller, now senior vice president for design and construction at Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Kadoorie has “the greatest sort of self-deprecating sense in recognizing that it’s all about the people in the room who created it. That’s why people appreciate it.”

The flip side is high expectations, but “if people can defend a position, he’s prepared to listen in spite of the fact that he’s so incredibly demanding and won’t take no for an answer,” says Miller, who describes Kadoorie’s perspective as being one of a pampered guest.

Kadoorie’s focus has also settled on technology, despite the not-terribly-smartphone he pulls from his breast pocket to illustrate his status as a “fossil.” A guestroom’s light, sound, television, air temperature and drapery – and even mood, if one pushes the “spa” setting in the salle de bain – are controlled via tablet and wall pad, built in Hong Kong and tested relentlessly in prototype rooms.

He knows that the younger generation prefers skipping the front desk and minimizing interactions with hotel employees. “Everything is so immediate,” he says. “How do we cater for that, and how does the hotel still cater for the likes of me?” His answer is anticipation and provision of a guest’s desires. “We try and keep data on everyone so that’s all ready, and that’s ongoing.” He adds, “And upgrades for people coming very often, where’s the future in it? Well, I think we will always have, or I hope in my generation, anyway, there’ll always be a personal touch. There’ll always be a welcome. There’ll always be someone recognizing you.”

Finding solutions

Not settling can mean finding unexpected solutions: The Peninsula Tokyo’s  design included a hidden atrium referred to as “the void,” Miller says, from the eighth to the 23rd floor. Kadoorie commissioned a metal-and-light sculpture to fill the space, hidden from view except from a handful of floors.

In Paris, the centerpiece of L’oiseau Blanc is a full-sized replica of the engine of the 1927 biplane for which the restaurant is named, created at Kadoorie’s request. Outside, suspended over the courtyard at eye level, is a replica of the plane itself. The original was piloted by Frenchmen who left Paris a few days before Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis left New York in hopes of beating the American’s trans-Atlantic record. They, and the plane, were lost at sea. The hotel company has funded a search for the wreckage.

Kadoorie’s enthusiasm in telling the story of the “white bird” and as a self-described aviation freak started with a Cessna in the 1960s and helicopters in the 1970s (the Peninsula Hong Kong has a helipad). That enthusiasm includes cars. Rolls Royces – the Hong Kong hotel started the tradition with a fleet of them – and tricked-out Minis are a mainstay of his hotels.

“I suspect it’s in my DNA,” he says. His father and grandfather motored around Europe; as a child, his family and their governess drove from Anchorage, Alaska, to Los Angeles. He drives in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run every November, in a one-cylinder 1903 Cadillac that offers little protection from the weather. “So it rains all over you, and my wife, who is Cuban, says only the English are stupid enough to do this,” he says. “But you have people coming out in the streets, all in the costumes of the day, all the way down to Brighton.”

He recognizes how this might sound. “With the privileges,” he says, “come the responsibilities. With the responsibilities come the privileges, and I think one should enjoy both.”

Michael Kadoorie, at age 12, about to embark on his first helicopter flight, on a weekend out from boarding school in Bern, Switzerland. With him is Leo Gaddi, the legendary former GM of the Peninsula Hong Kong.
Michael Kadoorie, at age 12, about to embark on his first helicopter flight, on a weekend out from boarding school in Bern, Switzerland. With him is Leo Gaddi, the legendary former GM of the Peninsula Hong Kong.

The responsibilities

Kadoorie hopes that his grown children, two daughters and a son, follow in the business. The oldest daughter, who lives in Hong Kong, attends the executive meetings. “I’m sure she will take her place,” Kadoorie says. The second daughter is studying filmmaking in New York. And his son, who has studied Mandarin and worked at the company’s property office in London, is set to join his father this spring at the office in Hong Kong. “He’s very interested,” Kadoorie says. “We’ve been blessed, really, because the three have their feet very much on the ground.”

The children’s involvement extends to philanthropic interests, another aspect of the Kadoorie DNA. “It’s something, actually, which gives the most pleasure of all,” he says, starting with his grandfather, who founded a school in Bombay. 

When asked if there is one charitable effort closest to his heart, he replies, “Each has its own, really own particular demand. Some of them are very humbling. Acid victims in Bangladesh who really have no future to look at… If a woman’s had a baby to her breast, the acid has fallen on that child as well. And to give them a reason to live, to give them an opportunity, to give them the light that we all have, that’s a privilege. It’s humbling.”

As for Kadoorie, while there is a succession plan, he doesn’t intend to step down, or back, any time soon. “My father died at 94, and he was in the office the day before. So God willing, if my health is all right and if I can contribute, if I have some value, I would like to continue, but you never know,” he says.

Where else would he like to see a Peninsula flag? “For this company it has to be a gateway city. It needs to combine business and leisure,” Kadoorie says. “Our market is we hope, at the 6-star level, and those are the kind of people who we would want to serve. At the moment we’ve got so much on our plate I couldn’t even guess where the next one would be.” He adds, “We believe that Rangoon will come up over the next 50 years, and we always look very long-distance.”

A hundred years? “A hundred years.”

Sir Michael, left, and his father, Lord Lawrence Kadoorie
Sir Michael, left, and his father, Lord Lawrence Kadoorie
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