Bill Bensley on Sustainability, Gaggan Anand’s Japan Hotel and Surya Sabha in Udaipur

If it's boring, it's definitely not Bill Bensley's. The American architect and interior designer, creates spaces that have a personality of their own, each different from the other. His designs are deeply rooted in place, handmade, layered, and slightly naughty. Inpired by architects and conservations, he has designed more than 200 hospitality projects across 50 countries. The creative genuis who has made Thailand his home is now designing Chef Gaggan Anand's debut hotel in Osaka, Japan.

Robb Report India sat down with Bill Bensley to discuss the projects currently occupying his imagination, from Chef Gaggan Anand’s hotel in Japan to Surya Sabha in Udaipur and the playful philosophy that continues to define his work.

Robb Report India(RR): You are designing Gaggan Anand’s hotel in Japan. What’s the thought process behind it?

Bill Bensley(BB) : Gaggan is not a man one quietly attaches to a hotel, like a brass plaque near the lift. He is a small controlled explosion in chef’s whites. So the thought process is not, “Let us make a tasteful hotel with a famous restaurant.” That would be frightfully dull and should be stopped by the authorities.

The question is: how do we create a hotel that feels as unexpected, emotional and slightly dangerous as Gaggan’s food?

Japan already has one of the most refined cultures on earth, so one must not arrive there wearing metaphorical tap shoes. You listen first. You study shadow, proportion, craft, restraint, seasonality, silence and ceremony. Then, carefully, you introduce Gaggan; which is rather like releasing a tropical bird into a Zen monastery and hoping it behaves. It won’t, of course, and that is the point. 

The hotel should not be a box with beds and a Michelin-adjacent dining room. It should be a sequence of discoveries. One door may lead to dinner, another to sleep, another to sake, theatre, mischief, or a small but memorable loss of dignity. Guests should never feel processed. They should feel ambushed—beautifully, intelligently and with very good linen. 

RR: With all the hotels you’ve designed or are designing now, what’s the leitmotif that makes it a “Bill” design?

BB: I sincerely hope the leitmotif is that none of them looks like the others.

A “Bill” design, if we must use such a dangerous phrase, should be deeply rooted in place, handmade, layered, slightly naughty, and entirely uninterested in looking like the lobby of an international bank. I have a violent allergy to generic luxury. The same grey sofa. The same beige stone. The same solemn floral arrangement looking as though it has just received bad news.

My work is about story, landscape, craft, humour, emotion and place. I want a guest to know where they are the moment they arrive. If you wake up in a hotel and need to look at the stationery to discover which country you are in, something has gone terribly wrong.

At Shinta Mani Wild, Cambodia, guests arrive by the Leap of Faith zipline into the Cardamom Rainforest. At Capella Ubud, Bali, I imagined a lost camp of eccentric European explorers in Bali, because why be normal when one can be magnificent? In India, the inspiration may come from palaces, gardens, stepwells, mythology, craft, forests and glorious human chaos. The point is never to impose a style. The point is to release the soul of the place; preferably before the accountant kills it.

RR: What really inspires you about design and the luxury that surrounds it?

BB: I am inspired by places with a pulse. Old places, wild places, handmade places.

Luxury is not marble by the acre. It is not a larger bathtub, unless the bathtub has something intelligent to say. Luxury is time. Privacy. Air. Shade. A tree that was not murdered for a view. A garden that has taken 20 years to become quietly spectacular.

Real luxury is the feeling that every detail has been considered, but nobody is standing there explaining it to you with a clipboard.

What inspires me most is the chance to make people feel more alive. A good hotel should wake up your senses. You should smell the rain, hear the insects, notice the floor under your feet, taste something grown nearby, and remember that the human body was not designed solely for airports, screens and chairs. If a hotel cannot do that, it may as well be a storage facility with breakfast.

RR: What really drew you to architecture and design? Tell us about some milestone moments when you knew this is what you wanted to do for long?

BB: Gardens came first. I have always been obsessed with plants, water, rocks, ruins, paths, shade, drama, and the way people move through a landscape. I do not see architecture and landscape as separate. A building without a landscape is often just a box with an ego.

One great milestone was arriving in Asia in the 1980s. Bali behaved very badly. It seduced me. I came thinking I might stay a while and then the island, with absolutely no manners, rearranged my entire life. The ceremonies, gardens, offerings, humour, craft and theatricality of daily life all made perfect sense to me.

India has also been a magnificent teacher. The forts, stepwells, palaces, gardens, textiles, miniature paintings, stone carving, water systems and sheer visual intelligence of the place are enough to make a minimalist faint into his oatmeal.

The moment I knew I was doomed (happily doomed) was when I realised design could contain everything I loved: art, plants, animals, history, craft, travel, conservation, storytelling and a useful amount of disobedience.

RR: Among all your design creations—from Shinta Mani, Capella Ubud to Gaggan—what is it that you aim to achieve with each project?

BB: I want every project to have a reason to exist. This may sound obvious, but alas, many hotels appear to have been conceived by a spreadsheet during a lunch break.

A project must protect something, reveal something, employ people meaningfully, support craft, honour its landscape and give guests a story they cannot have elsewhere. Otherwise, it is merely expensive furniture arranged around a swimming pool.

At Shinta Mani Hotels (located in Angkor and Nepal), the purpose has always included education, opportunity and community. At Shinta Mani Wild, the hotel is not the point. The rainforest is the point. The camp is simply the most delicious way we could think of to keep the chainsaws, miners and poachers out. At Capella Ubud, the aim was to create a fantasy, but one rooted in Bali rather than in some dreadful global idea of “tropical luxury.”

With Gaggan, the ambition is different again. Food becomes architecture. Hospitality becomes theatre. Sleep becomes part of the story. But the aim is always the same: I want people to leave changed; happier, more curious, more awake, and possibly slightly less suitable for conventional society.

RR: You’re a champion of sustainable spaces. What does sustainability mean in your work? Travel and sustainability are a kind of contradiction — don’t you think?

BB: Yes, travel and sustainability can be a contradiction. We should admit that immediately, preferably before someone in organic linen begins a panel discussion.

Flying across the world to discuss the moral superiority of bamboo toothbrushes is not going to save the planet. But travel is not going to stop. So, the useful question is: can travel protect more than it damages? Can it keep forests standing? Can it fund rangers? Can it employ local people properly? Can it make a piece of land more valuable alive than dead?

At Shinta Mani Wild, that is exactly the point. The camp exists to protect a rainforest valley from logging, mining and poaching. Guests help fund conservation and the Shinta Mani Foundation. That is not sustainability as decoration. It is sustainability with boots, mud, and ranger patrol.

In my work, sustainability begins with restraint. Keep the trees. Respect the water. Build less. Use local materials where possible. Design buildings that breathe. Work with artisans. Avoid idiotic waste. Make the project useful to the community, not merely photogenic for guests.

Perfect sustainability may be impossible, but irresponsible luxury is now unforgivable. The future of luxury must be regenerative, protective and rooted in place. Otherwise it is just very expensive nonsense with a spa menu.

RR: What are the countries that have inspired you the most and why?

BB: Thailand, because it became home. It gave me generosity, belonging, craft, humour, kindness, a husband, and the great privilege of building a life in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia, especially Bali, because it taught me that art does not need to sit obediently in a museum. It can be in a doorway, a temple, a procession, a garden, a piece of cloth, a meal, a joke, a funeral, a dance, a chicken basket—everywhere.

Cambodia, because it changed my sense of purpose. Through Shinta Mani and the Shinta Mani Foundation, Cambodia taught me that design can educate, employ, protect and heal. The Cardamom Rainforest taught me that sometimes the most important thing a designer can do is not add more but stop other people from taking things away.

India, because it is inexhaustible. India is not one inspiration. It is a thousand inspirations arguing magnificently in the same room, wearing better textiles than everyone else. The architecture, gardens, water systems, mythology, food, music, colour and craft are overwhelming in the best possible way.

Japan, because it teaches discipline, restraint and the beauty of the almost invisible detail. Japan is a useful antidote to my more operatic tendencies.

RR: We believe you’re working on some interesting projects in India. Tell us more.

BB: In Udaipur, on the last great shore of Lake Pichola, we are building Surya Sabha, a Ritz Carlton property. It might be the best thing we have ever done.

One possibility that excites me enormously is creating a Shinta Mani experience in India; not as a copy of Cambodia, because that would be idiotic, but as an Indian expression of the same values: place, purpose, protection, people, profit and poetry. India has landscapes and communities where hospitality could genuinely protect nature, revive craft and create livelihoods. That is the territory that interests me most.

RR: Who are the people that have inspired you and why?

BB: Roberto Burle Marx is at the top of my list. He taught us that gardens can be exuberant, painterly and emotional, not just polite arrangements of obedient shrubs. His work sings. Occasionally it shouts, but beautifully.

I have always admired Made Wijaya, who transformed Balinese gardens into magical, layered worlds full of humour, history, scholarship and criticism.

I am endlessly inspired by artists and conservationists as much as architects. Sir David Attenborough and Dame Jane Goodall remind us why the natural world matters and why mankind should occasionally sit down and stop improving everything into oblivion.

RR: What, according to you, are some of the iconic properties you have visited over the years?

BB: I love old ryokans in Japan, where every shadow, view, bowl, mat and gesture seems to have been considered for several centuries by people with better discipline than I possess. I love the great palace hotels of India like the Taj Lake Palace, Udaipur .

RR: If there was a project that you would have loved to be a part of, which one would it be and why?

BB: The Zhong in Punakha Bhutan, it is the best piece of architecture ever built.

Angkor Wat—although I would not dare to “design” it. I would perhaps have carried stones, swept the steps, planted trees, sharpened pencils, or made tea for whoever understood that architecture, water, landscape, astronomy, spirituality and power could become one astonishing thing.