An accidental hotelier

An accidental hotelier

In this busy era, we devise ways to make life easier for
ourselves. We tend to place people in groups, and mentally put
them in neat pigeon-holes in order for us to categorize them
quickly. We also tend to picture those in a particular group in
bulk: they have similar tastes, similar ambitions, and to a
degree, even look alike.

Whatever image you may have of an hotelier, it probably does
not fit Anhar Setjadibrata, the founder of Indonesia's Tugu
Hotels & Exotic Spas.

To begin with, he is more preoccupied with what artifacts are
displayed, when and where they are placed, and whether they
therefore represent the intended contexts and achieve the desired
themes, than with the service of the hotel, a task which he
happily relegates to his staff, including his daughter Lucienne.

Is this all a new gimmick of the hospitality industry?

You would not ask the question if you knew the genesis of the
business.

Setjadibrata, in a way, is an accidental hotelier. A keen
antique collector and a private historian, he found himself with
so many items he had lovingly collected over the decades that he
began thinking of acquiring buildings suitable to house them.

And it was then that he thought of a unique way of sharing the
collection with other people. In 1989 he built a grand house in
his hometown of Malang in East Java, and with a combination of
love and assiduousness, built his dream of antiquity into it, and
a hotel around it.

An inherent passion for history and a highly-tuned intuition
have helped Setjadibrata spot and collect extremely rare
artifacts throughout his life. His daughter Lucienne recalls how,
on a car journey across Central Java, they drove past an
ordinary-looking house which anybody would miss if they blinked.
Setjadibrata suddenly stopped the car, turned around and parked
outside the house.

Having asked the family to wait in the car, he went to the
front door, knocked, then disappeared into the house. Two or
three hours later, the family learned of him being taken to a
dusty store-room at the back of the house, where he found
numerous priceless artifacts from the 12th century Javanese
kingdom of Majapahit.

When he was a young medical graduate at a private university,
Setjadibrata's government regulated exams, a prerequisite to
practice in the country, were postponed indefinitely because of
the political situation at the time. This mishap became a
blessing in disguise, as he suddenly found a lot of time to
indulge in his passion for art and history.

As luck would have it, the young doctor quickly landed a job
as a medical representative for an international pharmaceutical
company, which required him to visit medical centers in far-flung
and remote villages around and outside Java. In these places he
invariably met people who discarded old and disused items they
had inherited but had not appreciated, which to Setjadibrata were
irreplaceable cultural representation. He began to collect them.

Setjadibrata also started studying law in 1973, abandoning his
medical career altogether. And after his graduation in 1977, he
embarked on a career as a legal consultant, while never stopping
his search for tangible evidence of the region's rich history.

The realization that his collection needed to be given
appropriate houses and preferably shared, drove him to build Tugu
Park in Malang. The feature of the hotel is a replica of the
royal court of Jayawarman II of Cambodia, the Apsara Suite.

Tugu Park turned out to be a great success, as it won a
national award for architectural excellence, and was named one of
the world's 101 Best Hotels.

The success encouraged him to build the second hotel in Bali,
in the coastal village of Canggu, in 1997, where Lucienne, as the
director of strategies and development, regularly takes their
guests for a tour, while entertaining them with invaluable inside
stories.

Several kilometers away from the hotel in Canggu is also Vila
Canggu, a spacious house where Setjadibrata constantly changes
the furniture and the artifacts displayed to achieve the
different themes and contexts he wants the place to have at
different times. This house is only available to rent to selected
guests.

The third and most recent Tugu Hotel was built in Blitar, East
Java, where Setjadibrata was born.

The latest business venture of the Setjadibrata family is a
new restaurant in Jalan Veteran, inaugurated last month by former
president Megawati Sukarnoputri, housing historical artifacts
from various corners of the region.