Axel Vervoordt is rearranging furniture inside a sunlit penthouse as his friend, hotelier Innegrit Volkhardt, watches on. The space distils Vervoordt’s refined sense of purity, an aesthetic drawing on the principle of wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection. The walls are richly pigmented in earthy shades, accents of wood bear the marks of age and simple, comfortable furniture is swathed in linen. A mood of serenity settles as soon as the door closes.
This is not the inner sanctum of an upscale residence, however, but a 350sq m suite spanning the entire eighth floor of Munich’s Bayerischer Hof Hotel. Volkhardt, the managing director and fourth-generation family owner of the hotel, has entrusted the designer, art dealer and curator with the task of breathing modernity into the grand address, which has welcomed guests on the city’s Promenadeplatz since 1841.
Actors, politicians, academics and pop stars have all found a home-from-home within these walls. Michael Jackson was a regular and the Dalai Lama stayed here, as did Albert Einstein and Queen Elizabeth II. Musician Lenny Kravitz posted a photograph of himself sprawled across the penthouse sofa, book in hand. Vervoordt has also become a familiar face at the Bayerischer Hof over the past 15 years, where he has overseen several phases of refurbishment. Despite “rarely doing hotel projects”, which he “seldom enjoys”, he has transformed 28 rooms and junior suites in the north and south wing, plus the garden, atelier and Palais Keller Restaurant, the astor@Cinema Lounge, the Palaishall and the other event spaces. He “made an exception for Innegrit”, whom he met through mutual friends (he also worked with the actor Robert De Niro on the penthouse of The Greenwich, his TriBeCa Hotel).
The new rooms, junior suites and penthouse here were completed in January (joining a sprawling offering of 337 rooms, including 74 suites, 40 meeting rooms, five restaurants, a breakfast room and spa, in addition to six bars and a nightclub, plus various shops). Eager to oversee the final touches to his new spaces, the spritely 77-year-old leads a tour around them. “Ah, the flooring here is so beautiful,” he says as we enter another zen-like apartment-suite. “It’s 18th-century oak, from France, a very rare find. I told Innegrit she had to have it.” The hotelier taps her heel on the floor in response. “And I said to Axel, there may be a small problem,” she jokes, drawing attention to the deeply grained and pitted wood, which is striking but far from mark-proof. “The patina is wonderful,” Vervoordt retorts. “And it will only get better with age.”
“It’s wonderful working with Axel,” says Volkhardt. “When we first started this collaboration, I had the chance to see him work at his studio in Belgium, and he took me to see the place where they keep all the wood. He knows every single piece in there.” Vervoordt’s eyes light up: “I call it my plank museum,” he says. “Take that coffee table in the corner. The top is 18th-century walnut, from my museum. I loved the round corners so much that we left them as they are. We try to respect the material. And the antique buffet over there [he points to a rustic butcher’s block] – it’s very old but there’s a minimalism to the piece, and it’s useful. Nothing here is decorative.”
Vervoordt’s passion for antiques stems from his childhood. He recalls visits to England to stay with family during the school holidays where he began buying and selling pieces at the age of just 14. “To this day, I love the English style,” he says. “The grand houses, where you’ll find a great console table with a Gainsborough painting and a pair of wellington boots on the floor. It’s all very casual: you have it, you live with it, and it never looks ostentatious.”
Vervoordt was later conscripted into the Belgian army, where he sharpened his entrepreneurial skills. “I told them I would not kill anyone, so they put me in the pharmacy – and there I set up an aperitif bar,” he laughs at the memory. “When friends came to my bar, I would ask if their families had pieces in the attic they wanted to sell. I did very well.”
His artistic career was similarly built on a shrewd understanding of the market. “I bought and sold my first Magritte painting at just 21. I knew then I wanted to be an art dealer,” Vervoordt says. He is both a bon vivant and a clever businessman who over the past 25 years has built an empire from Kanaal, an old Belgian distillery transformed into a headquarters and art hub, where his business interests span an interior design practice, an antiquaire, a private foundation and art galleries in Antwerp and Hong Kong.
Volkhardt was considered young when at 26 she took the reins of the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in 1992; her father died aged 75 in 2001 after a long illness. The hotel, which was originally conceived by industrialist Joseph Anton von Maffei at the express wish of King Ludwig I, was purchased by her great grandfather Herrmann in 1897. “It was not always easy. The family went through lots of difficult political periods, and the hotel was all but destroyed during the second world war. My father returned from the war and rebuilt it with his father. It took many years, all the plans were destroyed and they could only build in stages when they had money.”
The Bayerischer Hof gradually expanded to encompass a number of listed buildings (including Palais Montgelas) flanking the original site. But Volkhardt’s earliest memories here are not of gilded carriages and chandeliers but of crème caramel and Brötchen rolls. “I remember only fragments: walking in the garden and getting very excited about coming for lunch because I loved the rolls,” she says. “Back then, all I cared about was horses. I remember turning up for one important event in my jodhpurs, smelling of horses.”
Vervoordt, who shares Volkhardt’s equestrian passion, takes great delight in her story. For many years he began his mornings riding Raio, a Portuguese Lusitano, around the grounds of his castle in ’s-Gravenwezel, near Antwerp, where he lives with his wife May. “I only stopped recently,” he says. “Sadly my horse died. I bought another but couldn’t get on with him. He bumped me off. I said that’s it, no more horseriding for me.”
Volkhardt starts her day in a similar fashion at the family estate in Starnberg. She takes care of her four donkeys before arriving at work at 9.30am prompt. “Luxury is having time to myself, which is so rare for me,” she says, noting that her grandfather Hermann advised her never to live at the hotel. She has, however, continued what he started at the address, not by clinging to nostalgia but through a gradual reinvention. Hers is a constant balancing act between traditional and modern, but in doing so, the Bayerischer Hof caters to diverse tastes, whether its guests check in for swags and tails or Vervoordt’s understated elegance.
“Axel’s rooms have been extremely successful. He has fans all around the world,” Volkhardt says. She admits, however, that it took some visitors time to get accustomed to the concept. “For the first rooms Axel designed, we produced ‘how to live here’ leaflets. Some people didn’t understand the thought and intention behind the suites – their definition of luxury was gold accents and branded names. But Axel has taught me to understand the importance of natural things,” she continues. “That an old table is prestigious. It is such a quiet expression. So for those who don’t understand, we try to show them the beauty of quietness.”
“I don’t like anything fake,” Vervoordt responds. “Everything I do has to be real. I like natural materials because they are timeless, and the things you can move around: the furniture and the art – they bring in energy. It’s a balance of the ephemeral and the eternal.” He turns to his friend: “I find many hotels, and I won’t say the names, to be vulgar. I hate plastic, and that everything feels plastic. For me luxury is to live with great materials: beautiful wood, but also wonderful silks and velvets that you find in old palaces, because they are real. They belong there.”
But what makes a hotel special? “The people,” Volkhardt says without hesitation. “Service makes all the difference.” “I disagree,” Vervoordt says, laughing. “It’s the rooms.” His friend smiles. “Yes, it’s a mix of both, and we have plans for many more Axel rooms here.”
bayerischerhof.de
