Grand Stays, Small Impact

An edible golf course, a university mascot, a paper-mâché poodle party-expect the unexpected at a luxury hotel designed by Bill Bensley. Across the world, the landscape architect and hotelier has designed spaces that are sustainable and buzzing with stories. In a conversation with Eshita Srinivas, he goes down the rabbit hole of all things design, conservation, and art.

Bill Bensley
ARCHITECT AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER

When did you know you wanted to tap into this niche of designing sustainable spaces?

When I was about this big (gestures with his hand to indicate a rather tall young man). When it comes to sustainability, it’s quite common sense to me. I grew up on a farm in California and we grew everything that we needed—honey, apricots, rabbits, ducks, pigs, chickens, quail. Whatever was left from dinner would go into the compost and the garden three months later. Nothing in our house was wasted. So, as a student of landscape architecture, I did a big project on sustainability. At that point, there were 52 schools in the US teaching landscape architecture. And I won first prize. That got me a full scholarship at Harvard which was unheard of at the time.

While designing a hotel, do you make amendments for families and children?

Designing for kids is beyond a room full of plastic balls. We just did this hotel in a series of train carriages. And I did several rooms with bunk beds. I think the most important thing I’ve understood is that kids love small spaces, it makes them feel comfortable. So, in all the places I design for kids, I always make tiny doors their size. So, the parents and I have to really scrunch down to get in. It’s a different scale, I call it the hobbit scale. I was just in Danang and visited the children’s creche at Inter-Continental and was told it was their most popular. There I made 2m high papier-mâché poodles with big balls of fur and stuck them on the ceiling upside down. So, there’s a dog party happening in the children’s view.