What do you call someone who creates one-off hotels at the far bespoke end of the luxury spectrum, while simultaneously steering a global hospitality conglomerate to the fastest growth in the industry? Someone who can launch one of London’s most desirable private members’ clubs, and scale a value-proposition hostelry that looks great and only costs you €120 a night? Is that person a wunderkind? A prodigy? Forty-two-year-old Sharan Pasricha, the founder and co-CEO of Ennismore, the lifestyle hospitality company recently valued at more than €2bn, is more like a sport of nature: someone with the DNA of hotelier, real-estate developer, branding geek and club impresario, spliced together in a weird new species of hospitality purveyor.

Four years ago, Ennismore comprised two entities, and not nearly as many people knew Pasricha’s name. One of those entities was Gleneagles, the country-house hotel in Scotland. Staid, bordering on snoozy when Pasricha acquired it in 2015, it has since been parlayed into a place where a world-class spa faces off with pocket speakeasy bars, where there’s a glittering retail arcade to rival the Burlington and Royal ones in London, falconry and shooting facilities, and a driving course for the kiddies. The other was The Hoxton hotels, which Pasricha grew from a single cheap-and-cheerful Shoreditch address to a dozen stylish mid-price-point properties that span the globe, from Brussels to Brooklyn.

In October 2021, Pasricha entered into a joint venture with Accor, the world’s sixth-largest hospitality company. A Gallic Goliath to Ennismore’s David, Accor has a few thoroughbreds, such as Raffles and Fairmont, in its huge stable, but also a lot of homely workhorses along the lines of Swissôtel, Mövenpick and Ibis Budget. The deal consolidated 14 hotel brands under the Ennismore umbrella, and the leadership of Pasricha and co-CEO Gaurav Bhushan. The Hoxton is one of them; so are Mondrian, SLS, 25hours (founded in Hamburg and aimed at twenty- and thirty-something party people) and Mama Shelter (the budget-chic brand that’s a particular hit in its native France). Almost all of them are companies that Accor CEO Sébastien Bazin had acquired small but strategic stakes in over the years.

The partnership might have looked a case of strange bedfellows to the layperson, but to Pasricha it added up. “Sébastien always had a VC mindset, and I liked that,” he says. “He puts a lot of thought into where the industry’s going, and was consistently ahead of the game. What was always clear was that if he were to ever consolidate [the lifestyle brands], they’d need a new home. Accor wouldn’t make sense, because of the way they all flourished in the first place – under a founder-led mentality, in dynamic, creative, fast-paced, independent environments.” So Ennismore – founder-led, dynamic, independent – became their new home instead. A fruitful partnership, it turns out, for all involved: last November, Accor sold a near-11 per cent stake in Ennismore to a Qatari consortium, in a deal that shot the company to its current valuation. This was just a few months after Pasricha and Bhushan inked a $400mn, tripartite agreement with the Saudi-based Tourism Development Fund and Al Rajhi Capital to roll out its lifestyle brands across the Kingdom. Today, according to Accor, Ennismore is one of the fastest-growing players in the fastest-growing segment in hospitality.

Read the full article at ft.com