Adrian Zecha
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Adrian Zecha

Adrian Willem Ban Kwie Lauw-Zecha (born 1933), better known as Adrian Zecha, is an Indonesian hotelier and founder of several international hotel companies including Aman Resorts, Regent Hotels, GHM Hotels and Azerai Resorts. He is best known for founding Aman Resorts and for his influence on the development of luxury resort design and branding worldwide. Zecha was also part-owner of the renowned London’s Dorchester Hotel, and Bangkok’s The Sukhothai Hotel through his investment company.

Zecha began his career in hospitality in the 1960s and was involved in the early development of Regent International Hotels in partnership with Four Seasons Hotels. He later co-founded GHM (Global Hotel Management), a company that operated luxury properties in Asia and beyond.

In 1988, Zecha founded Aman Resorts, opening the first property, Amanpuri, in Phuket, Thailand. The brand became known for its low-density, design-focused luxury hotels and played a significant role in shaping the high-end resort market in Asia and later globally.

Zecha was born in 1933 in Sukabumi, in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). He attended school in Jakarta before going on to study at Phillips Academy and later at Oxford University, where he read English literature.

Zecha was born in Sukabumi, Indonesia into the Lauw-Sim-Zecha family, part of the Cabang Atas or Chinese gentry of colonial Indonesia. His family is of Peranakan Chinese and Bohemian roots. He is a great-grandson of the late nineteenth-century magnate and mandarin Lauw Tek Lok, the first Luitenant der Chinezen of Bekasi (a high-ranking post in the civil bureaucracy) by the latter's controversial interracial marriage to Louisa Zecha, an Indo plantation owner of Bohemian descent. On being widowed, Louisa Zecha went on to marry another Chinese magnate, Sim Keng Koen, the first Kapitein der Chinezen of Sukabumi, where her great-grandson Adrian Lauw Zecha was born.

Zecha's father, the plantation owner Aristide William Lauw-Zecha, was the first native-born Indonesian to graduate from any American university, Iowa University, in 1923. The connection with America continued with Zecha and his four brothers, who were all educated in the United States.

Zecha is also a cousin of the Malaysian royal, Che Engku Chesterina (née Sim-Zecha). His brother, Austen Zecha, was the founder of TBWA-ISC Group, an agency that is credited with the award-winning “Malaysia Truly Asia” campaign for Tourism Malaysia in 1999. Another brother, Alwin Zecha, was the founder and executive chairman of the Pacific Leisure Group, a destination management company with offices in 38 countries worldwide, and also served as a board member and Chairman for numerous other organizations, including PATA.[citation needed]

Zecha attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Following graduation, he briefly attended Johns Hopkins University to pursue a medical degree on his father’s wishes, but later dropped out and instead pursued a Master in Journalism from Columbia University.

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