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.