BUSINESS Zim and the Art of Hotel Magic

BOB ZIMMER, SPEAKING TO AN AP.

preciative group of Cornell University hotel management students, is in the middle of a long disquisition on
relating to people as people and not as assets, on accepting the Nineties, and unlocking the value that is common to
all mankind.

“What is Bob Zimmer talking about?” he pauses to ask. And well he might. A chat with the fifty-two-year-old
formerCEO of Rosewood Hotels, the man who created the Mansion, can be a mind-bending experience that leaves the
listener suspended somewhere between awe and befuddlement.

In the course of an hour, Zimmer, now head of the Robert D. Zimmer Group, a hotel development and management
company, ranges over Cherokee traditions, the Gaia principle, manners in Thailand, the environment, Texas
politicians, Buddhist monks, the business dealings of Caroline Rose Hunt, and the “new paradigm” that, he says, must
shape our thinking in the Nineties if we are to cleanse our spirits and our environment.

Not your average businessman, Bob Zimmer. He likes to remind associates that the Cherokees, before they decided to
hunt in a particular territory, would ask how their decision would affect their descendants-not during the next
quarter, but over the next seven generations. But Bob Zimmer is not out to repeal progress and put an end to growth
and consumption. In his version of the good life, there is no necessary contradiction between a deep concern for
planetary health and an $18 chunk of sword-fish with ancho chili butter. The hair shirt would not fit a man who was
CEO of Rosewood Hotels for almost a decade.

In 1980 Rosewood was Zimmer, a secretary, and Caroline Rose Hunt’s checkbook. By 1988, when he left after
disagreements over “deep value issues,” Zimmer had built Rosewood into a $200 million company whose prize-winning
properties were the envy of the hospitality trade. Zimmer’s work, seen at the Mansion, the Hotel Bel-Air in Los
Angeles, and Hawaii’s gorgeous Hotel Hana-Maui, is synonymous with graceful, expensive living. It was Zimmer who
hired superchef Dean Fearing to create a special cuisine “indigenous to the Southwest” (or at least to its wealthier
citizens) in the Mansion’s five-star kitchen. It was Zimmer who, in the words of Bel-Air managing director Paul
Zuest, “created amenities nobody thought of. He upped the ante in the industry. What he creates is expensive, no
doubt about it. But in his case, it’s very, very successful.”

Born in Los Angeles, Robert Dolph Zimmer worked as a bit player in numerous movies produced by his father, a
production manager and director for MGM, and later studied to be a priest. In Hollywood, Zimmer primarily worked as
a stunt man (“I specialized in falling off horses,” he says), but he can also be glimpsed in Take Me Out to the
Ball Game, in which Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra have larger roles, and he has a few speaking lines in The
Monty Stratton Story.

A solid Catholic upbringing and the influence of a saintly parish priest led Zimmer into the seminary. Though he
eventually realized that his mission did not lie in the church, he recalls those quiet, monastic years as a gift.
“There is so much tumult and conflict in your teens. This gave me a chance to stop, to be still and within myself. I
felt very clear, very focused.” The young Zimmer became a ferocious reader and an ardent student of both Western and
Eastern philosophy while in the seminary-the beginning of an eclectic education that would serve him well as his
work took him to a dozen foreign countries.

After earning degrees in art, architectural planning, and business from the University of Southern California,
Zimmer worked in development, planning, and design with various California firms focused on what would later be
called the Pacific Rim. Through his work with hotels and resorts in Fiji, India, Thailand, and other Third World
countries, he came to pity those countries that were frantically turning themselves into clones of Los Angeles and
New York in order to lure Yankee dollars.

“Third World countries mirror the West, and they mirror the negatives, too,” says Zimmer. “They do this at the
sacrifice of their history, their architecture, their great traditions. You can become modern or contemporary, but
don’t lose culture and the history which gives each society its uniqueness. Why do I want to go to China to stay in
a New York hotel or eat in a McDonald’s?”

After the successes of the Mansion and the Hotel Bel-Air, Zimmer put Rosewood’s money where his mouth was in the
renovation of the historic Hotel Hana-Maui, stressing “stewardship” (a favorite Zimmer term) of the land and the
Hawaiian cultural heritage. The previous owners of the declining landmark had met massive resistance from the local
community when they unveiled plans for a sweeping renovation that would have made the Hana-Maui indistinguishable
from the Marriott Anywhere. That project was abandoned.

Taking a “holistic” approach, Zimmer worked an unorthodox magic dedicated to maintaining “life in balance” at
Hana-Maui. There would be no blue-eyed technocrats