Interior design gurus of yoo head for Mumbai
yoo Phuket is a yoo Design Studio project with Philippe Starck as creative director.John Hitchcox, 49-year-old co-founder of yoo -- a star-powered global design development firm -- is one of the most influential property developers in Europe. His company is in more than 25 countries and the latest tack on the map is India, specifically Pune and Mumbai where we meet Hitchcox on a recent trip.
Credited with bringing Manhattan style loft living to London in the early 1990s, Hitchcox set up yoo about 10 years ago, with venerated designer Philippe Starck. The two iconoclasts decided to call it yoo because, well, it's all about you.
They have done 33 projects across 27 countries including such well known hot spots as the Mondrian South Beach hotel in Miami and the Gramercy in New York.
In December yoo will launch its first Indian venture, with local developer Panchshil Realty, through the yoopune estate. And have also been commissioned by Mumbai luxury developer, Lodha, to bring design-oriented apartment living to a global standard in this chock-a-block city.
The Prada of property
Dubbed the "Miuccia Prada of the property industry" Hitchcox comes from a family of architects and his grandfather was a builder. He's been remodeling and converting homes since he was 19 and says he's never looked back.
He knows Mick (that would be Jagger), plays in a rock band with guys from Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, he was linked to supermodels Elle McPherson and Kate Moss and he loves to chat. A journalist's dream, as it were.
It was an a-ha moment at the Delano Hotel in Miami, in the late 1990s that Hitchcox realized he needed to focus more on interior design.
He got in touch with Starck and the rest, as they say, is design history.
"We’re building a sense of community," Hitchcox says. "Philippe calls it a tribe. We create a sense of a village in an urban environment. He and I talked about the world of real estate development. You had big levels of urbanization, massive urban migration and fundamental social shifts..."
But the thing Hitchcox waxes most eloquent about is the importance of home. And how the function of home has changed over time and how as society gets increasingly fragmented, the home is the one place people turn to for comfort.
Says Hitchcox, "Home is a place of nourishment. It's now a place for work, love, family. It's for your own internal security, your confidence. For most people, their home is their biggest purchase."
The idea is straightforward enough. Yoo came up with four broad styles to fit peoples' personalities -- culture, classic, nature and minimal.
They play up on these styles with themes such as "techno," "aristo," "urban," and "disco," but the idea is that you can pick and choose designs that suit your lifestyle and capture the zeitgeist.
Yoo has a roster of well-known designers, bold-face names like Jade Jagger, Kelly Hoppen, Marcel Wanders and most recently, Anouska Hempel.
It's all about yoo in India
Located at Koregaon Park Annexe yoopune is being built among 17 acres of rainforests by award-winning landscape architect, Bill Bensley. Some 216 apartments in six towers are for sale, and buyers have the option to choose from either of two design palettes, classic and nature. Yoopune will include a Six Senses spa, as well as tennis courts, a tea lounge, swimming pools and a cigar room.
It's easy to assume yoo came looking for India, when the interesting backstory is actually that Sagar Chordia, strategic director at Panchshil Realty, was in a cab in Israel when he passed yoo Tel Aviv. Chordia says, "I saw two unique buildings...fantastic architecture, so I went in and they told me it was a Hitchcox project."
"John's very lively," Chordia says of Hitchcox. "He understands design but also a developers mentality and what kind of return he expects. They don't just charge a fee, they make sure the value goes up."
Chordia says they've already had a pre-sale of 25 apartments at Rs 15,000 a square foot before yoopune's official launch in December 2010.
Hitchcox feels strongly about India. "It's an exciting place and fascinating to watch the changes," he says. "For so long you were exporting from here to the West and now the West is coming back here. Our first few projects here are high end, but our philosophy is to add value where we can by improving the quality of design, layout and thought. I think there's a real appetite for what we do here."
He's reluctant to get into the details of yoo's Mumbai plans with Lodha, saying the developer probably wants to make his own announcement at a later date. It's unclear which Lodha project it's for, since there seem to be at least a dozen cropping up besides the much talked about 117 story World One, the world's tallest residential tower. But Hitchcox hopes to do more in India, that's clear.
So are you a potential yoo customer? The company's research says clients tend to be a mix of aspirational types and those who really want a home to come home to. Ask Hitchcox, he says they're "ambitious, enterprising, entrepreneurial and creative." Sounds exactly like Mumbai, come to think of it.
