“By the time we opened on March 23rd, 2017, every one of our 72 bedrooms had been slept in by a manager at least three times,” says Reed Kandalaft, GM of the month-old Four Seasons at the Surf Club in Surfside, Florida.
“There was tremendous expectation at this hotel and once we got all necessary permits we were, at a week’s notice, able to pull our opening forward by four days. We had 15 rooms occupied that first night, and we are on track to do 60% occupancy, with 4.5-night average stay, in our first year,” he said with a big smile.
Why that anticipation? The Surf Club had been established in the 1930s as a private gentlemen’s club by tire heir Harvey Firestone, and during the following decades every Hollywood name, plus Sir Winston Churchill, appears to have used it as their temporary home. In 2012, the historic building, along with nine acres of ocean-set land, was bought by Fort Capital Management, led by Nadim Ashi. The real estate magnate and entrepreneur then persuaded the owners of Four Seasons Palm Beach to sell that property to him, and thus gained local seaboard rights to the Four Seasons name.
“The main business goal is two blocks of residences, with 147 units, but Nadim Ashi wanted a hotel, and the best hotel possible, to anchor the whole development,” Kandalaft explained. His owner is a connoisseur, and as well as getting the Four Seasons brand, he has licensed one restaurant, dinner-only, to Thomas Keller – this will open later this year. The Surf Club’s historic ballroom has been bisected, partly into a palm-filled bar, the remainder into another Ashi favorite, Le Sirenuse restaurant, the first outpost of the Sersale family’s famous restaurant in Positano, Italy.
“Le Sirenuse was a great success from day one. All the team are ours, but we scoured all the local freestanding Italian restaurants to get the best servers. Practice and more practice meant they had served over a thousand cups of coffee by the time we opened,” Kandalaft stated. The restaurant is open breakfast, lunch and dinner, and attracts locals keen to remember their own trips to Italy. It also helps fill bedrooms, which are minimalist, with off-white Travertine stone and floor-to-ceiling windows to give amazing views over the Atlantic Ocean a few yards away.
“Before opening, our owner and the Four Seasons head office team spent hours on such details as making sure closet doors opened completely silently,” he recalled. Once the 147 residences, which will have housekeeping and private dining options, are open, his total team will be about 350 but now it is merely 290. Line staff came onboard in November 2016 and, he admits, one or two could not take Four Seasons’ training.
“The young do not want micromanaging but that is not my way anyway. Just as I am left to my own devices, apart from a weekly telephone call with my RVP, so my team are empowered.”
The youngest of six, Kandalaft was born in Damascus, Syria, to a Lebanese-origin father and Syrian mother, and brought up partly in the UAE. He has always been surrounded by hospitality (“when we have family gatherings today, my two kids have 14 cousins around them,” he laughed). After bachelor’s and master’s degrees in hospitality management at Florida State, he turned down an opening with Four Seasons to do Marriott management training – but then, the more he knew about Four Seasons, the more he wanted to join that company. He finally achieved it, as director of rooms in Hualalai, Hawaii. It took him a year, then, to understand what Four Seasons was all about.
He came to Four Seasons at The Surf Club, his first GM role, from Los Angeles. “My biggest challenge, honestly, has not been adjusting to the top job or to an opening, but in trying to manage so many stakeholders, from investors and designers to highly discerning guests, and my team,” he admitted. He learned from such mentors as Four Seasons’ Christian Clerc, Chris Norton and Martin Rhomberg always to keep calm. “Before-breakfast gym workouts really help,” he revealed.