Globalista

Feature / North America / United States / Utah

Amangiri Utah by Bella Pollen

By Globalista

Just getting there is something of a surreal experience. First you fly low over Valley of the Gods or, if you’re really lucky, past the iconic monoliths of Monument Valley. Next you find yourself sitting in a cavalcade of BMWs driven by men in dark glasses, cutting through an unidentifiable moonscape towards the horizon. Eventually, this line will slow at the approach to a rusted gate, before turning off down an unpaved road that leads seemingly to nowhere. Where are you bound? It’s hard to say. This is the American West and all roads look as if they lead nowhere. Suddenly though, the mesa opens up into a canyon and reality truly flips on its head - instead of dominating the landscape, your magnificent procession of 4WDs is now dwarfed by a 600-foot cretaceous rock wall and looks about as significant as a convoy of black ants. Yet on you crawl until, finally, there it is, rising out of the desert floor - no, not the new headquarters for Men in Black - but something equally alien to the setting: the recently opened, freshly anointed member of the Aman chain, Amangiri in Big Water.

Built from sand-colour concrete, the Amangiri complex of low buildings are so aesthetically fine-tuned to their surroundings they look as though they’ve been carved from the rock themselves. The main hub of the hotel is a city block sized room incorporating a reception, an open plan kitchen and restaurant, a library, numerous log-fires and squashy leather sofas in which to enjoy them. Even as you’re being checked in, it’s hard not to ogle the view. A glass wall looks out to the jagged line of Canyon Point while opposite, doors open onto a pool built around a rock that looks like the head of a dinosaur dipping for a drink. In the summer, this terrace offers a reprieve from the blistering sun; a great sweep of water to cool the blood of every over-heated magnate. Today, though, is a crisp winter’s day - Boxing Day - and snow lies across the desert like a sprinkling of icing sugar. The pool’s temperature has been racked up and thick steam is rising. One or two people are in the hot-tub; others are reading newspapers and books, daubed in sun cream, wrapped in cashmere blankets and drinking warm spiced apple tea. It’s a scene of delicious tranquility made even more surprising by dint of its back-of-beyond location.

Utah is an odd state, notorious for three things. First, its monoculture: over 60 percent of the population here is Mormon and belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then there’s its Prozac use - approximately four times the national average. Finally Utah appears to have an unfair monopoly on North America’s parks, canyons and national monuments. Bryce, Zion, Arches, Bridges, Grand Staircase-Escalante, you name it: in Utah you’ll find it.

It’s a mixed bag of recommendations but despite tourism being the state’s fastest growing industry, one thing Utah is not known for is hotels. Which is not to say it doesn’t have plenty. I’d be happy to direct you to establishments where every turn of the overhead fan drops desiccated flies onto your pillow, roadside inns where the soap has fossilised into the shower tiles or cheap lodgings with bed bugs and bad odours where it’s wise to sleep with a knife under your pillow. There are a smattering of lacy Victorian B&Bs where honeymooning Mormons write coyly about their ‘ first nights’ in the visitors book ; Best Westerns with Mad Men-era coffee percolators and pull-down ironing boards for $ 39.99 a night. And thanks to the fact that 80 percent of Utah is set aside for public use, you may also legally lay your head in the back of a pick-up or on the roof of a houseboats. I’ve even slept under a blanket on the hard ground once or twice, but what I’ve never done is sleep between Egyptian cotton sheets in a wickedly comfy grand-chieftain-sized bed. So, as I lie in my suite, watching stars beginning to glint in a darkening sky, I pinch myself, because I never believed this place would come to be.

I first came to Big Water over a decade ago. It was big even then, but there was precious little water to be found. It was early August 1999 and temperatures were peaking at 115 degrees - the perfect day, according to German born Christoph Henkel and his then partner Bernt Kuhlman, to show their friends around a six hundred acre parcel of land on which they were intending to build a luxury hotel. As a group we should have been a soft sell - all of us were smitten with the west. All of us had overseen our own building projects in inaccessible spots. None of us were exactly averse to the idea of pampering and two of the group happened to be architects. One, the highly respected Annabel Selldorf, who was later to become a pivotal part of the project, and the other, Maya Lin, of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, an artist not exactly short on imagination herself. Nevertheless, we declared Henkel insane. Though beautiful, the plot looked like an oversize quarry, elemental, desolate, unforgiving. A scramble up the nearest rock face afforded a view over Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made recreational areas in the US. Why, we heckled our friend, would anyone want to pay top dollar for a luxury hotel here when over the next hill, 2, 000 miles of unspoilt shoreline beckoned, offering warm water and relatively inexpensive houseboats to sail on it. Forget practicalities, even conceptually the undertaking felt like a Herculean task. But this is exactly the kind of project Henkel specialises in: show the man a pipe dream and watch him put his time, money and powerful drive behind it.

Henkel’s love of remote places can be tracked back to his childhood - a great deal of which was spent running up and down Austrian alps, rifle in hand, chasing chamois and wishing himself the owner of a time machine to transport him back to the days when mountains were unexplored and uninhabited. Moving to America as a young man, he soon realised that a time machine was both expensive and superfluous to his needs. North America was a continent with dazzling amounts of wilderness and Henkel’s passion for the West was born.

After a short stint in LA, he relocated to a post iron curtain Europe, to Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic where he worked for his family business, Henkel Industries, a consumer products and adhesives company. Never entirely at home in altitude below 10,000 feet, he returned intermittently to North America where he began looking for land in Canada. He eventually found himself in South West Colorado, honing in on Dunton, an abandoned ghost town in the wilderness of the San Juan Mountains. By this time Henkel’s heart was beating not just for mountains but for the lowlands, the Colorado plateau. Dunton offered both. An old mining town in an alpine valley, replete with deer, mountain lion, bobcats and wild turkey, the place was little more than a trickle of hot water oozing from the ground and a collection of dilapidated 19th century shacks. For Henkel and Kuhlman, the renovation of Dunton Hot Springs became physically, mentally and financially an obsession every bit as dangerous as mining. Phone, electrics and plumbing had never been so much as a gleam in any sane realtor’s eye and if there once existed a commercial rationale for the place, it was soon discarded. Henkel was a romantic and fell in love with the town. He hoarded Dunton and, although it now operates part time as a small resort, he decided to keep it mostly for family and friends and began looking further afield for a hotel site.

‘Utah is arguably one of the most beautiful states in North America,’ Henkel declares. The scenery is filmic, epic. Most of the population live in or around Salt Lake City, leaving vast tracts of land empty. ‘There was very little private property out there and what we found was always too dry, always too inaccessible, always down that proverbial road to nowhere.’ Until one day they stumbled across a ‘For Sale’ sign near the town of Big Water. It was exactly what they were looking for: 640 acres of original deeded, homesteaded land owned by a local consortium. Spectacular and utterly barren, it was perfect - except it was under contract to someone else. Whether they made an almighty nuisance of themselves or whether they displayed so much absurd optimism that fortune rewarded them, Big Water eventually became theirs. ‘When the local owners signed with us, you could see them thinking, phew, finally we offloaded that. Let’s face it, they were right to be relieved. What are the odds of two European lunatics coming in and buying some random piece of landscape,’ Henkel smiles grimly. ‘By most people’s standards, that rock was really out there….’

The key to the land was its water rights and its proximity to Page airport. So how does the process work? How do you end up with an Aman, one of the best known names in the hotel business? Is it a question of x marks the spot and off you go?

‘Not exactly,’ Henkel says. ‘People always point to Vegas, but you have to understand, building anything in the desert is a crazy idea.’ And in the beginning the ideas were nothing if not crazy.

First they decided to build a yurt village, importing genuine Mongolian yurts.

‘Low impact, low cost, the idea of cocooning,’ Henkel ticks off his fingers. There were several problems with that idea: you couldn’t see out of the window, being ‘cocooned’ in a yurt in the heat wasn’t appealing and the prototype blew away every time there was a summer storm. The most ambitious design of all was ‘Lake Powelet,’ a recreation of a mini-lake by flooding a section of the canyon, then blocking it off with a plexiglass dam to create a series of pools and waterfalls ‘Of course. It was just ludicrous,’ Henkel recalls, and finally he put his foot down.

Determined to keep the impact on the environment as minimal as possible, he turned to Rick Joy, a Tucson architect famous for his use of rammed earth. Long proven as effective in arid areas, rammed earth is an ancient form of construction, whereby walls are made by compacting moist subsoil as opposed to top soils. The first layout suggested 60ft high concrete walls to mimic the canyons and it was immediately thrown out for both fiscal and stability reasons.

Page one, as the project came to be known was something Henkel pored over for years, designing, refining, and discarding. I’m not sure what kept him going through the hiring, firing and inevitable fallouts; pride, no doubt and a giant dose of bloody mindedness. Didn’t matter either way - we still thought he was insane. Who were these people who would come flocking to Canyon Point, we kept asking? But he held onto his rocky field of dreams.

The years went by. Proposals changed, architects came and went until finally ideas were distilled into one clear, if seemingly unattainable directive. He needed to build a 30-60 room, five star hotel which could be integrated into the surroundings; one which would incorporate both Navajo and Mormon culture; a hotel that opened all year round and was unique enough to attract the clientele to fill it. Henkel knew of only one brand with this kind of pull: Aman. He approached its founder, Adrian Zecha who fell for the property as soon as he saw it. ‘That’s the thing about Zecha,’ Henkel says, deadpan, ‘he really understands locations’.

Their kick-off meeting was scheduled for Sept 11 2001 at Amangani in Jackson Hole. By the time the two men recovered from the dreadful events of that day and found they couldn’t fly anywhere, there was little else to do but jump in the car and drive down to Utah to try and site the hotel. ‘When Zecha travels, or is in motion of any kind, he sleeps. During the two days we drove from Jackson Hole, to Page, he seemed to sleep the whole way. No doubt the reason he keeps so young.’ When they arrived at Canyon Point, Zecha got out of the car, stretched, pointed at this one spot, and said, ‘what about there.’

The site was perfect except for one minor problem. It wasn’t on Henkel’s land.

It belonged instead to the NRA - not the Charlton Heston firearm variety, but federal land deeded as a National Recreation Area. Fortunately the government was interested in a land exchange, a two-year process requiring congress, senate and presidential approval. After the swap went through, Henkel went on acquiring large parcels of land until the 600 acres rose to over 2000.

The water rights to this piece of desert come from an aquifer, an underground layer of water bearing rock. ‘We knew the land had phenomenal water, even if we had to drill 900ft down to access it. Water rights in Utah are based on a ‘use it or lose it ‘Spanish law which in turn is based on an even more ancient Moorish law. Daunting? ‘On the contrary,’ Henkel says, ‘you’re dealing with a thousand year old legislative history. It’s actually pretty cool’.

Land in Utah is hopelessly overgrazed. The only thing left growing on Henkel’s acreage was black brush, which cattle don’t like, but the minute you begin to irrigate the desert comes to life again. Through the window of the hotel’s living room, native grasses can be seen beginning to re-establish themselves across the desert floor. Day by day Amangiri becomes more of an oasis, inside and out. Aman style is Asian minimalism, but the philosophy has always been to create something unique to the area in terms of materials, colour and referencing.

Hanging on the walls are oversize canvasses painted in a nearby cave by German artist, Ulrike Arnold, who grinds her own pigment from the surrounding rocks. There’s an outside fireplace where local Navajos tell children’s stories in the cool of the evening. Many of the staff are Native Americans, a significant number of whom work in the resort by day and return home at night. There could surely be no greater contrast between this ‘lifestyle of the rich and famous’ and the local reservation, where some people live in homes without running water or electricity and yet… it appears to be working.

There is genuine local pride in the hotel and a consensus that the job has been well done. The nod to the Mormon culture means no alcohol in the bedrooms’ mini bar, but built into every suite are private courtyards with ‘ fire-pits’ where you can eat, or just lie back and watch the sky with its on cue storms and sunsets. Bathrooms are open-plan with oversize tubs set beneath rarefied views. The whole hotel seems to have been designed for maximum vegging out. The spa’s high smooth concrete walls and sage burning fires all promote a feeling of lazy calm. From the sauna and steam room to the glass walled yoga pavilion and massage rooms, the scale of everything is large - but then the one thing the west isn’t short of is square footage. There is also no question of being shuttled in and out for appointments. I spent an entire afternoon lolling around on the hot stone floor, cold dipping and steaming on repeat loop without seeing a single member of staff. It’s a clever ethos. Stock the place with everything it needs; a thousand bottles of water, a never-ending supply of towels and cosy dressing gowns and allow guests to get on with it.

Until recently, the Aman concept could be summed up by this focus on time and leisure - two things the stressed out magnate could never get enough of. Historically the hotels have never offered much in the way of activities but their clientele is getting younger and those coming to this part of the world are often keen to explore the phenomenal range of Utah’s landscapes. To this end, Henkel has inveigled his mountaineering partner and veteran guide Mike Friedman away from the Colorado Rockies and together they have set up a programme which includes one hour hikes with a local geologist, full day trips to Lees Ferry, Bryce Canyon and the Vermillion cliffs to name but a few. There’s also rock climbing and tours through the private slot canyons of Navajo land, where prehistoric sea animals are fossilised into the narrow walls and lit by shafts of refracted light .

If exploring is your thing, there is no better place to do it than here. If you need to rest up, the hotel offers more than enough to keep even the most indolent of couch potatoes happy. If you’re a gourmet the menu doesn’t disappoint (interested guests are regularly invited into the kitchen to bake their own bread or make pizza). The really exciting thing about Amangiri is that it offers it all. Bravo to Henkel. He built it and they are coming. In droves. (00800 2255 2626; www.amanresorts.com).

Bella Pollen's new book 'Summer of the Bear is published by MANTLE £12.99