By The UNCHARTED® editors · 4 min read
Wild at Heart
Renowned artist, landscape architect, and designer Bill Bensley has created glamorous hotels and lodges across Asia for decades. For him, conservation and sustainability come first … and then the fun begins. His next project? Safari camps in the French Congo.
Based out of Bangkok and Bali, Bensley’s company has its fingerprints on some of the most fabulous UNCHARTED Outposts in the region. They’ve designed over 200 bespoke and eccentric hideaways, prominent among them Bangkok’s Siam and the Capella Hanoi—which was voted one of Travel + Leisure’s best cosmopolitan hotels, and is a throwback to the French opera and jazz luminaries of the Roaring Twenties that frequented the city.
As an acknowledged industry leader, Bensley has written: “Luxury is DEAD. In hospitality…we should shoulder more responsibility concerning issues like clean, accessible water, alternative energy, energy consumption, food waste, wildlife protection, and conservation. The big hotel companies are part of nature and society too, not just [the] economy.”
Combining both his signature narrative approach and conservationist ethos, Shinta Mani Wild tented camp in Cambodia’s Cardamom Rainforest is one of his most cherished projects.
The 15 luxurious tents are manifestations of Bensley’s imaginings of what it could have been like when Jackie Kennedy traveled the country to meet King Sihanouk in 1967. Guests can swim in surrounding natural pools and awake to the howls of gibbons while receiving royal treatment from personal butlers. Bensley is particularly stoked about the Tarzan-style arrival: A 400-meter zipline whizzes over the forest canopy, river, and waterfalls before landing at the Landing Zone Bar, where gin and tonics await.
SEE THE CAMP
To call the overall effect theatrical would be an understatement. Out of this world would be more like it, and indeed, Bensley describes his aesthetic as “maximalist.” He has also become a prolific painter in recent years. Asked how he accomplishes so much while still living such a life full of art and creation, he replies, “Honestly, I work really hard but play harder!”
Whimsy and world-class hospitality aside, however, Bensley is primarily motivated by Shinti Mani’s conservationist agenda. “I am first and foremost a landscape architect and a conservationist,” the native Californian says. “I have spent much of my life working to protect the natural world.”
After buying a Central Park-sized swath of rainforest with his friend Sokoun Chanpreda to keep it from becoming a titanium mine, Bensley set out to preserve its nearly one-million trees and restore threatened wildlife by establishing anti-poaching units. Since then, more than 1,300 families have received access to clean drinking water via 1,500 wells, and he has established the Shinta Mani Foundation, which provides community development initiatives in Siem Reap that include small business opportunities and vocational training in the hospitality industry.
“Come and visit us in Cambodia!” Bensley implores. “Since it is the poorest country in Southeast Asia, Shinta Mani makes conservation of the Cardamoms and assisting the [communities] a priority.”
This year the foundation will spend $500,000 on preservation efforts, wells and homes, and occupation-focused education, among other crucially important items.
“All of this funding comes from wonderfully adventurous people that care and understand more and more about the world around them,” he says.
Bensley has traveled to over 100 countries and tells EVOLVE: “I love learning about new cultures and seeing untouched wilderness before it disappears. Typical highest-end luxury when traveling, for me, insulates or buffers reality and proper meaningful experiences. Luxury for me is a waste of time. Been there, done that. My [annual] Mongolian treks are far more memorable than a Godiva chocolate on my pillow.”
He adds, “My favorite village in the world is Luang Prabang, in Laos. Buddhist, respectful, peaceful, and insanely fun during festivals, while also artistic and surrounded by forests.”
UNEXPECTED SOUTHEAST ASIA
SEE THE TRIP
Bensley finds seemingly endless inspiration in the cultural artifacts of Asia: French-Lao architecture inspired the Luang Prabang hotel he did for Rosewood, which he calls “one of my top five.” And for a project located outside Khao Yai National Park, he upcycled railcars into suites to evoke the romance of Thailand’s train system from a century ago.
But his most far-flung and ambitious project yet is establishing a safari camp in the remote French Congo that borders Cameroon and the Central African Republic, in the [Sangha] Trinational park.
“It takes two days from the capital to reach,” he says. “There are no tourists, and the Baka people, commonly known as the pygmies, greet me at the trailhead. We are building just three camps, and each will have four fab rooms built high on stilts, allowing the forest elephants to walk underneath.”
Bensley says he is taking a zero-footprint approach to construction and that camp revenues will be used to pay rangers.
“Sir Richard Attenborough says this is the last wilderness left on the planet, and there are more families of gorillas and chimpanzees than anywhere in the world. Jane Goodall said she wished she had studied chimpanzees in the Congo.”
For having such a unique opportunity to preserve a critical habitat for threatened species so close to humanity’s heart, Bensley says, “I am the luckiest hotel designer in the world!”
