City & Country: Big market for building of resorts in Malaysia

MALAYSIA has always been marketed as a travel destination famous for its islands and beaches. Even the government’s Visit Malaysia Year 2014 campaign is promoting them as one of the attractions.

According to Philippe Villeroux, the founder and director of Tropical Area Resort Consultants (TARC), Malaysia is not building resorts fast enough, considering it has a lot more to offer. TARC is a resort design consultancy.

“There are very few resort projects in Malaysia now,” says the Frenchman. “The resort industry is quite slow here.”
He says there are probably many reasons why the resort industry in the east coast is not thriving as much as it should.

“It’s probably due to the monsoon season.” However, he says it isn’t really a major issue.

“I think it’s a mistake because at the end of the day, you still have a nice place to visit and beautiful things to see.

“People generally say it’s going to be seasonal. Look at Koh Samui in Thailand, it has the same climate and season, and people still go there all year round. It’s a shame though, because Redang and Perhentian islands are so much better than Koh Samui.”

The problem, he says, is that Langkawi and other islands in Malaysia rely too much on transfer by boat.

“When you build a resort, you must provide the services as well. That means, if the sea is rough, there must be a way for visitors to reach the islands by other means.”


Building a reputation
Villeroux has 13 years of experience designing resorts in places like Sepang in Malaysia, the Maldives and French Polynesia, and used to work and live in Tahiti.

He was at the REKA Conference in October last year where he shared his knowledge and experience on resort designs in more than 40 remote locations.

He has done design work with Club Med when working at Eric Raffy & Associates. Then, he joined Tropical Architecture, a leading architecture firm in French Polynesia, where he gained extensive knowledge about overwater resorts.

When Tropical Architecture was hit by the global financial crisis in 1998, Villeroux was forced to move back to Tahiti. In 2001, he came back to Malaysia and set up Tropical Area Sdn Bhd, concentrating on resorts in the Maldives, French Polynesia and Southeast Asia.
“I came to Malaysia in the early 1990s to work on a Club Med Cherating renovation project. I was working in French Polynesia at the time. Tahiti is a beautiful place, but it was too far for doing business.”

Villeroux says he fell in love with Malaysia during his journey to Cherating, Pahang, from Kuala Lumpur.

“At the time, there was no highway and the trip just made me fall in love with the rainforest between Pahang and Kuala Lumpur. It’s difficult to explain.”

He has worked on a host of projects in Malaysia, including Sepang Gold Coast in Sepang, Selangor, and Club Med Cherating, Pahang, as well as a few others in Langkawi, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur.

According to him, his company has 75 projects in Malaysia, both completed and ongoing.

“It’s starting to be a good business for us because we have built a reputation. And it’s purely by word of mouth.”

Villeroux says a resort is the location and the environment, not the buildings.
 
People don’t come for the buildings. You go to a resort because of the location, the beaches, the forests and the views.

“Something I learnt while working with Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas in the Maldives is that the ideal resort is one without buildings. If you have a beautiful island, you only need a building, just a nice place to sleep.”

Today, almost half of TARC’s clients come to them with a parcel of land earmarked for a resort. “We have clients who have land but don’t know what to do with it,” he says.

Despite the good demand for his services, Villeroux never takes on more than four projects at a time.

“My strategy is to stay small. It’s pretty easy to grow the company, but all I want is to maintain a small team of not more than 20 people. We are focusing on quality rather than quantity.”

According to him, TARC wants to improve its products and services. “It’s smaller, so the quality is better. The turnover will grow with the quality of our projects.”

This strategy is also a safety measure in terms of being able to withstand the ups and downs of the market since there are a lot of challenges in this industry, he says.

“We had a project in Lahad Datu that was affected by the intrusion of Sulu gunmen, while a kidnap and murder case happened at another project on Pom Pom island in Sabah. This means that the projects are often halted. We have to be conservative.”

He says most of his projects take eight to 10 years to complete, particularly if there are issues with land rights and design.

Moving ahead
He adds that 2014 is going to be a year of continuity for several of his projects.

“We are in the process of designing two projects in Sabah. We’re also starting the physical work at Ritz Carlton in Langkawi and a project each in the Maldives and Bali.”

In Sabah, Villeroux is looking at smaller projects. Besides the two in hand, Villeroux is expecting to take on another six to seven equally smaller projects. “One of our projects is on Pulau Gaya. The first phase will be a sort of kelong floating around the island, never staying at one spot for more than six months. It’s for people who don’t like making reservations. So we are trying to work with the villagers on the island to sell their produce to the tourists.”

He adds that the kelong project will take a long time to complete as it will have to go through several phases, from design to construction.

However, he says, the state authorities are very helpful. “It’s a matter of explaining and making them understand. Most of the time it’s just respecting the locals and taking into account their needs. This is the balance you have to strike.”

On the challenges he faces in the industry, Villeroux says the time it takes to complete a project is one of them.

“Our projects are usually developed over five to 10 years. During this period, there will be bursts of intense work and long waits. It is quite difficult to have the same focus on the project while having to organise our activities with flexibility.”

TARC also experiences some financial difficulties. According to him, the contract fees may seem promising initially, but will look very small after six years of work, with another two years to go.

“So, you really need to focus on the project and its achievement instead of the financial gain.”

Another challenge is the members of his team. Villeroux says it is difficult to find professionals with long-term commitment and the ability to adapt to different environments.

“Our projects usually seem simple to young architects. However, designing small buildings in natural settings is not as appealing to them as designing a 100-storey tower. In fact, this requires a lot of knowledge, culture and sensitivity.”

Villeroux’s solution to this is to have a small team of key people. Some of his staff have been with him since the establishment of the company.

However, his greatest challenge is aborted projects. “As we usually intervene at the early stages of development, clients sometimes don’t know what they want to do with their investment, so many projects are never completed.”

He says for every project completed, five are stopped at different stages of design. He adds that one client said he would rather spend RM10 million in abortive studies than lose RM50 million in a failed resort.

“It is very difficult to have dreamed of a resort that you always believe will be the best only to realise that it will never happen.

“The ideas we come up with for a particular project are never applied to another. We design based on the site and the type of holiday the resort will provide, so a lot of the solutions are unique. It hurts to see that some of them will never be used.”


This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on February 14, 2014.

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