Growing up in a small Swiss family hotel where no school-age child was considered too young to perform hospitality chores, Kuno Fasel knew one thing – he wanted out of the all-consuming industry that for years had eaten up his after-school playtime, weekends and holidays. 

But somehow, the chief operating officer of Como Hotels and Resorts has ended up running round the world managing every minute aspect of a small chain of luxury properties for a far more demanding family than his own – the formidable Ongs of Singapore.

A decade ago, Fasel arrived at the London Metropolitan – Como’s flagship urban property, which he ran for five years. Before that, he was at Four Seasons, where he spent two decades managing key Canadian properties.

Today he’s back in London, ruminating in the Met Bar about the demands he and his new surrogate parents make constantly of each other: “I say to Mr. Ong all the time: ‘Give me three more city hotels - I need a Metropolitan in New York, in Shanghai, maybe one also in Bangalore’,” he confides.

It’s not such a tall order for the fabulously wealthy couple. Ong Beng Seng – whose net worth was estimated at US$580m by Forbes Magazine in 2007 – buys hotels outright as if he was playing Monopoly with them (19 in eight countries, including ten Four Seasons), while Christina Ong, owner of the Como boutique hotel empire, is worth an estimated £100m in her own right, thanks to profits from the Armani and Dolce & Gabbana retail franchises in London, Asia and the USA and her holding in the Mulberry bag company.

Ms Ong is famously interview-shy, but her number two is happy to talk about what Como is up to, revealing a surprising amount of activity for a chain barely a decade old.

“We’ve bought land on Hokkaido in Japan to build a ski-in, ski-out resort. I’m standing by to look at a potential property in Italy. We’re adding a lodge to our Uma Paro property in Bhutan, and a new top floor here in Park Lane to make the spa five times bigger and add two suites, a yoga room and a gym. The views from the 11th floor are spectacular,” he reports.

“Negotiations are under way to manage a new hotel in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We’ve bought a small resort northwest of Melbourne where I’ve suggested we should invest in a spa and make a new Como property. We’ve already started managing the spa at Kandooma in the Maldives. More spa management contracts are likely in the development of our Como Shambhala brand. But we’re also actively looking to expand the Metropolitan brand with more city hotels and the Uma brand.”

A sprightly 66, Fasel jokes more than once during our conversation: “I’m too old for all this,” and recalls how his original trepidations about the industry as a small boy in Switzerland have held true - working at the sharp end in hotels is a 24/7 commitment.  “Working when everyone else was off having a good time seemed ridiculous to me growing up – which is why after helping to run our hotel near Freiburg after school with my eight brothers and sisters, I told my mother: ‘This isn’t for me’.”

But at 18, he had an epiphany within the space of three months: “I hated the commercial apprenticeship I’d opted for, which saw me working in the office of a department store. I wanted to be back out there, giving service to people, making them happy.”     

Training at the famous Lausanne hotel school followed, and the Sixties saw Fasel in London for the first time: “We were sent out from Lausanne as the future hoteliers of the world – but when I arrived at The Ritz, they made me a busboy,” he laughs. He made it through promotion to  Palm Court waiter, then to reservations clerk, before leaving the following year for Canada – “that’s where we were told all the opportunities were at hotel school” – where he first met Ong Beng Seng 25 years ago. “He had just bought the Four Seasons Montreal, where I was General Manager. When he sold it a few years later, he said: ‘Kuno, do you want to come with me? You can manage the Metropolitan and Halkin in London and other hotels as they come online.”  

Thus Fasel segued into Christina Ong’s world of chic minimalism and obsession with design detail which characterises Como across the brands, from London to Parrot Cay in the Caribbean, Cocoa Island in the Maldives, the Metropolitan Bangkok, the two Uma rustic-chic properties in Asia and the lavish Begawan Giri estate in Bali. While Ong keeps her beady eye on every vase, coaster and menu card to make sure they reflect her personal vision for each brand, Fasel’s brief covers everything else, from managing and training 1700 staff worldwide, to vetting potential new property acquisitions.

Mostly, though, it’s firefighting. When we meet, he has already been on the phone for hours with Parrot Cay, where hurricane damage is causing concern, and the Metropolitan Bangkok, where managers are biting their nails over whether political agitators will close down the airport. He’s in London now for meetings, and soon it will be time to return to Bali and Bhutan to see which butlers should next be selected for a two-year rotation to the Caribbean, which lacks the service culture, he feels, for homegrown buttling of a sufficiently high standard.

It’s just as well he has no obligations to partners or children, since even on a rare break, his time has not  been his own since he joined Como: “I was in a lift in Switzerland last week, taking a couple of days off, when Mr. Ong called me and said: ‘Kuno, be prepared to go to Parma and look at a property’,” he says. “I was in Singapore when Mrs. Ong called me on a Sunday afternoon and said she was sending a driver over to bring me to her house. She wanted to tell me she had just acquired Begawan Giri in Bali and that within months it was to be transformed into a Como Shambhala Estate.

“Coming from a big corporation like Four Seasons to work for a family direct was a big change – even though I had worked for my own family, it took me a year to get the hang of the Ongs and to understand how the way they organise their businesses between them worked. But maybe because I have no family of my own, I embraced the relationship. They create a magic, and the staff feel it too – that’s why even those who leave come back.”

Since he fears Christina Ong has woven such a spell on him that he may never get to retire and take up gardening, Fasel gets down and dirty with the landscape gardeners whenever he’s at the Begawan Giri Estate, which serves double-duty as a training ground for spa therapists and butlers.  “I even brought back a plant I heard Mrs. Ong did not like, to find out if it was true: ‘Do you like it a bit, a lot or not at all?’ I asked her. ‘It would be fine,’ she said, ‘if they didn’t just plant it all over the place.’”

The next week he was in Parrot Cay discovering that despite a fine training on Bali, his butler was still not quite up to the exacting standard Fasel expects of his staff: “I told him that when I asked for a 6.30am wake-up call to go to the gym, he should have known to be there at the door with my shoes, just as if I tell him I have a half-hour in my schedule to lie in the sun, he should have the lounger and umbrella arranged. But he learned fast – on my last day he found me and persuaded me to make a window to go out and look at the beautiful sunset, because he knew it was my last night.”

While sunset-gazing and gardening seem likely to remain rare treats while he’s on board with Como, Fasel says the sheer excitement of working for such a mercurial and fast-moving couple is what keeps him working 18-hour days well past retirement age:  “I’ve never forgotten that it’s only six years since the Ongs came to me here in London and said: ‘Kuno, you’d better get ready – we’re opening five hotels in Asia’. It was news to me, but within a year they were all open. In this organisation everything happens very fast, and you can never tell what’s going to come next.” But he guesses they won’t be filling those obvious gaps with Metropolitan hotels in New York and Shanghai “until the location, price and everything else are just right.”

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