MEETING…MICHAEL BEDNER


“Howard was my best friend, he was one of the loveliest people I ever met and really is the icon of the industry.”


the time, Mr Lautner couldn’t pay me so


he was feeding me lunches,” he continues. “I could give him any I number I could conceive, a big number like US$7. I thought I’m rich, I’m rich, so I said yes. When I hung up the phone I started crying because I’d sold out for the big bucks.” The pair were friends from then on,


later becoming business partners. “I was shocked when Mr Hirsch proposed to name the company Hirsch Bedner,” he explains. “Howard was my best friend, he was one of the loveliest people I ever met and really is the icon of the industry.”


THIS PAGE: ESPA at The Europe Hotel & Resort, Ireland PREVIOUS PAGE: Four Seasons Resort, Seychelles (LEFT), Arion Resort & Spa, Astir Palace, Athens (RIGHT) FOLLOWING PAGE: CRU Steakhouse at JW Marriott Hotel, Beijing


Bedner has designed thousands of hotels in his tenure. In the early days, he worked with Steve Wynn and Roger Thomas on the Golden Nugget, more recently collaborating with the pair again on refurbishments to Wynn’s hotels here in Las Vegas. The firm’s latest projects span the entire spectrum, from casino hotels, to resorts and city dwellings and include Waldorf Astoria Shanghai, the spa


028 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2011 WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM


at The Istanbul Edition, Ritz-Carlton Dubai International Financial Centre, and Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. “We have resort experience from our first offshore office in Hawaii which I got to open at the ripe old age of 22,” explains Bedner. “We got to do a lot of major resort properties that gave us a great understanding of the beginning of the industry of resorts. Plus our office was right opposite Waikiki Beach so I’d have my drawing board on the lanai, then every noon I’d go surfing. It was really fun,” he recalls. HBA now has 13 offices around the world


employing a total work force of 700, double that of five years ago and substantially larger than the 22 employees Hirsch and Bedner once agreed on. One of the firm’s largest set-ups is in Singapore, as a high percentage of the company’s projects – up to 300 on the boards at any one time – are in Asia. It also has offices in Hong Kong, Atlanta, Tokyo, Melbourne, and New Delhi, established


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