At home with Langham Hospitality Group CEO, Bob van den Oord

“It will be a gorgeous hotel sitting on the Chao Phraya River, a beautiful location with a lot of heritage. It’s going to be a landmark opening that will very much cement Langham’s reputation in Southeast Asia,” he says. Following that will be The Langham, Venice, located on Murano—the island famed for its centuries-old glassmaking traditions. The site is a 16th-century casino, reimagined by award-winning, Milan-based architects Matteo Thun & Partners into a 133-room hotel.

Bangkok and Venice will be the latest in a series of Langham properties that pair heritage with modern hospitality: The Langham, Chicago occupies the first 13 floors of the city’s famous IBM building designed by Mies van der Rohe; The Langham, Boston sits in the old Federal Reserve Bank; and then there’s the one that started it all—The Langham, London, which opened in 1865.

“It was the first hotel with running hot and cold water, the first hotel with air conditioning, the first hotel with elevators, which were called ‘rising rooms’ in those days. It was also the first hotel in the world to serve afternoon tea,” says Van den Oord. “We’re very proud of our heritage, but we’re not nostalgic about it. We’re very much looking towards the future and trying to tap into what the new customer is looking for.”

The hardware at Langham properties is always distinct. “It’s important that every hotel has a sense of place,” says van den Oord. “When you check into The Langham, Custom House in Bangkok, [you should feel that] you’re in Bangkok.” But it’s the software that makes it distinctly Langham. Van den Oord says that it’s consistency that keeps loyal guests coming back, whether it’s in the afternoon tea—the hospitality group has an in-house pastry academy to ensure its afternoon tea remains a universal signature—or in its quality of service, which the CEO describes as “the Langham way”.

“We’ve created, I feel, a really powerful culture throughout our hotels where staff can be themselves; where they can be authentic, unpretentious and unscripted,” he says. “They’re able to tell their story the way they see fit with our guests.

And I think that engagement, that authenticity is very much what the Langham way is all about.” When he’s not busy overseeing the Langham empire, Van den Oord says he enjoys hiking Hong Kong’s mountainous terrain with his Rhodesian Ridgeback, Cooper; and, perhaps surprisingly for someone in the travel industry, spending time at home. An avid art collector, his walls are adorned with pieces by the likes of Spanish painter Lita Cabellut, Chinese artist Zhang da Zhong and photographer Terry O’Neill.

He also loves hosting and cooking for friends at home— hospitality truly is in his DNA.

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