Sharan Pasricha – hospitality’s unstoppable operator

What do you call someone who creates one-off hotels at the far bespoke end of the luxury spectrum, while simultaneously steering a global hospitality conglomerate to the fastest growth in the industry? Someone who can launch one of London’s most desirable private members’ clubs, and scale a value-proposition hostelry that looks great and only costs you €120 a night? Is that person a wunderkind? A prodigy? Forty-two-year-old Sharan Pasricha, the founder and co-CEO of Ennismore, the lifestyle hospitality company recently valued at more than €2bn, is more like a sport of nature: someone with the DNA of hotelier, real-estate developer, branding geek and club impresario, spliced together in a weird new species of hospitality purveyor.

Four years ago, Ennismore comprised two entities, and not nearly as many people knew Pasricha’s name. One of those entities was Gleneagles, the country-house hotel in Scotland. Staid, bordering on snoozy when Pasricha acquired it in 2015, it has since been parlayed into a place where a world-class spa faces off with pocket speakeasy bars, where there’s a glittering retail arcade to rival the Burlington and Royal ones in London, falconry and shooting facilities, and a driving course for the kiddies. The other was The Hoxton hotels, which Pasricha grew from a single cheap-and-cheerful Shoreditch address to a dozen stylish mid-price-point properties that span the globe, from Brussels to Brooklyn.

In October 2021, Pasricha entered into a joint venture with Accor, the world’s sixth-largest hospitality company. A Gallic Goliath to Ennismore’s David, Accor has a few thoroughbreds, such as Raffles and Fairmont, in its huge stable, but also a lot of homely workhorses along the lines of Swissôtel, Mövenpick and Ibis Budget. The deal consolidated 14 hotel brands under the Ennismore umbrella, and the leadership of Pasricha and co-CEO Gaurav Bhushan. The Hoxton is one of them; so are Mondrian, SLS, 25hours (founded in Hamburg and aimed at twenty- and thirty-something party people) and Mama Shelter (the budget-chic brand that’s a particular hit in its native France). Almost all of them are companies that Accor CEO Sébastien Bazin had acquired small but strategic stakes in over the years.

The partnership might have looked a case of strange bedfellows to the layperson, but to Pasricha it added up. “Sébastien always had a VC mindset, and I liked that,” he says. “He puts a lot of thought into where the industry’s going, and was consistently ahead of the game. What was always clear was that if he were to ever consolidate [the lifestyle brands], they’d need a new home. Accor wouldn’t make sense, because of the way they all flourished in the first place – under a founder-led mentality, in dynamic, creative, fast-paced, independent environments.” So Ennismore – founder-led, dynamic, independent – became their new home instead. A fruitful partnership, it turns out, for all involved: last November, Accor sold a near-11 per cent stake in Ennismore to a Qatari consortium, in a deal that shot the company to its current valuation. This was just a few months after Pasricha and Bhushan inked a $400mn, tripartite agreement with the Saudi-based Tourism Development Fund and Al Rajhi Capital to roll out its lifestyle brands across the Kingdom. Today, according to Accor, Ennismore is one of the fastest-growing players in the fastest-growing segment in hospitality.

All of which makes Pasricha’s side game that much more interesting. He opened Maison Estelle, his extravagantly beautiful private members’ club, in late 2021, on the site of the former Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office on Grafton Street in Mayfair. Its seven opulent storeys – handpainted murals in the first-floor dining rooms, a retractable glass ceiling for the rooftop terrace – feature not one but two subterranean nightclub levels. The founding membership includes aristocracy of the Hollywood, Silicon Valley/Wall Street and actual Almanach de Gotha varieties. (Don’t bother Googling for images; the reception staff put a small sticker over every phone’s camera to prevent photos of members and interiors from circulating on social media.)

Next month, Pasricha will open Estelle Manor on the grounds of what was formerly Eynsham Hall in west Oxfordshire. A rural satellite escape for Maison Estelle’s members on a 60-acre estate, it is a country club and a hotel, featuring 108 rooms and suites, four restaurants, and a spa called the Eynsham Baths in its own multi-level pavilion. Estelle Manor stands to out-glamour even Gleneagles, which was voted Best Hotel of 2022 by Virtuoso, the US-based consortium of luxury travel agents, so that’s a lot of glamour indeed. “Sharan Pasricha is modernising traditional hotel stays and elevating them into luxury lifestyle destinations,” says Virtuoso CEO Matthew Upchurch. “Gleneagles’ transformation is the perfect example of a property with a rich tradition and fresh appeal to upscale travellers, and Estelle Manor looks like it will offer a similar sensibility.” 

A place for people with plenty to say and nothing to prove

How can Pasricha be Accor Guy and Maison Estelle Guy? Ignoring, or eliminating, the walls and barriers to entry that have traditionally separated lifestyle categories seems elementary to him. He’s confident enough to open a private club in London, the city where the model achieved its apotheosis, and dispense with one of that model’s most foundational orthodoxies: the dress code. (“A place for people with plenty to say and nothing to prove,” goes his unofficial tagline for Maison Estelle, where on any given evening gilets and Birkenstocks will probably be mixing with double-vent custom tailoring and vintage YSL eveningwear.)

Some of this confidence likely derives from the circles Pasricha and his wife, the investor Eiesha Bharti Pasricha – a daughter of Indian billionaire businessman Sunil Bharti Mittal, who is Ennismore’s primary backer – move in. “Eiesha is abundantly more social than I am,” he says, laughing, when I ask how they collaborate. “I’m all work. She’s incredibly social, knows everyone.” Bharti Pasricha without question has a solid sense of style: the brands she has backed include Roksanda, Jonathan Saunders and Beautystack. The retail arcade at Gleneagles, where tailoring by Giuliva Heritage and Dunhill, jewellery by Ilaria Icardi and cashmere from the likes of Chinti and Parker, Hawico and &Daughter are merchandised in pretty glass-fronted boutiques, is her doing. 

Officially, Bharti Pasricha acts as Maison Estelle’s artistic director (among members I know, she’s also quietly credited as having had a hand in the quality and diversity of the founding cohort). “At a certain point I realised, probably about a year before opening [Maison Estelle], that there was no woman’s voice at the table,” Pasricha says. “We ran the risk of going down that gentlemen’s club route. I said to her, ‘I need your help on uniforms, on art, on tablescapes, on smell.’ We were already all designed, and my team was in place, so it was more a sort of layer above – the pixie dust.”

While Estelle Manor’s Grade II-listed, 1908 neo-Jacobean Hall is about as grand as they come, the nothing-to-prove maxim will hold here, too. Its ground floor – huge spaces with period wood panelling, ornate ceilings and 10ft-tall French doors and bay windows – contain both members-only zones and public rooms for hotel guests: a library, a bar and various restaurants, among them a dazzling Chinese restaurant with glowing green malachite-finish tables and a mirrored ceiling.

The Hall’s 34 rooms and suites, as in any old house, vary in size and dimension; all have been layered up with jewel-toned textiles, tonal marbles, porcelain, brass detailing and handpainted and -flocked wallpapers. Antiques feature throughout, but so do contemporary canvases and sculptures; bold modern light fixtures make the occasional big statement. The lavish, Downton-meets-Downtown aesthetic is predominantly that of New York-based Roman and Williams – Pasricha, a longtime fan, enlisted them in 2019 to work alongside him on the design of Maison Estelle, and here the collaboration continues.

Some original outbuildings have been reclaimed, turned into a gym, a kids’ club and co-working space. Others, known as the Walled Garden and the Stables, are new constructions and hold more suites, as well as a standalone conservatory restaurant. A long, sexy pool has been installed in the flagstone terrace of the Hall’s south front, from which the views are of Constable-esque bucolia. The Eynsham Baths – 30,000sq ft of white stone, plaster and painted brick – will almost surely set a new bar for British Country Wellness, though the inspiration seems very “last days of Rome”, with caldarium, tepidarium, hammams and an open-air grotto.

As we tour the Manor on a frosty spring morning, Pasricha’s conversation goes nimbly in many directions: in an hour, we cover urban regeneration, fine tequilas, lederhosen (in his 20s, he ran his uncle’s leather factory in Delhi, which was India’s largest exporter of the Bavarian trousers to Europe) and Spotify founder Daniel Ek. “I love Daniel’s journey. Here’s a guy who against all the odds made a unique business, and didn’t just succeed with its uniqueness, but also went head to head with the world’s biggest company – and then not only survived that, but managed to completely thrive.”

Telling stories with hotels is what I love about this work

Pasricha is elegant, affable and exudes confidence; his description of himself as “fairly unemployable” in his youth, though sweet, sings with false modesty. (That affability is not perceived universally: a lawsuit brought against him and co-CEO Bhushan in March by Sydell Group, the owner of NoMad hotels, claims that Pasricha – acting in breach of a confidentiality agreement – tried to “sabotage” efforts to find a buyer for half of its business in 2018, after Sydell’s Andrew Zobler opted to partner with MGM Resorts International in lieu of Pasricha and Ennismore. Zobler maintains Pasricha’s actions resulted in MGM having to pay a higher price, thereby depriving Zobler and Sydell of a potential payout. An Ennismore spokesman calls the claims “completely baseless”, and the company is contesting them.) 

His first business, a media company he founded at 21, targeted the university-student market – “a de facto ad agency that was also a magazine, a direct marketing company, a bit of everything. It was me being a factchecker, publisher, ad-sales guy. Three years of fun. And some major mistakes! But I learnt so much.” Then came the uncle’s leather factory. “I’d never even been to a factory before, let alone run one.”

It was in Delhi that he met Bharti. “We both wanted to be in London – she’d gone to school in the UK – but I couldn’t just rock up with nothing to do; I was 27. So business school seemed like a good idea.” While at LBS, he came across a biography of Isadore Sharp, the legendary founder of Four Seasons. Lightbulbs went off. Had he at that point ever entertained hospitality as a career avenue? “Never. But after I read that book I was fascinated by the art of it. It combines so many of my passions – architecture, neighbourhoods and urban development, real estate, storytelling, brand building, culture, purpose, digital.”

During his MBA, he immersed in the industry, seeking the counsel of Kit and Tim Kemp, the founders of Firmdale Hotels, and befriending Soho House creator Nick Jones, with whom he eventually collaborated at The Hoxton, Shoreditch, which he purchased in 2012. Jones recalls the younger Pasricha as “eager, passionate about getting into hospitality… He’s a guy with extreme talent and spirit for helping people have a good time – a bit like how I see things. To see him [become] the person he is, and the business he’s grown today, has been incredible.”

“Shoreditch had become the epicentre of authentic new stuff – art, coffee, chefs and all the rest,” Pasricha says. “I always thought The Hoxton’s bones were amazing, but it was sort of frozen in an earlier time; I thought it could have such a larger conversation with what was happening in the neighbourhood.” When he took over in 2012, “I basically moved in – did every job, worked behind the bar, house-keeping, sales and revenue management. Shoreditch House had opened and I knew Nick quite well by then, so I asked him to focus on operating the restaurant” – Hoxton Grill – “while I learnt the rooms business.” Pasricha renovated the public spaces, put together an events programme (DJs, art shows), “and the hotel just transformed. And we realised there was an opportunity to do this in other neighbourhoods.” Holborn came next, then international expansion.

The brands are the sweet spot in his business spread. “Hotel [brands] are about real estate and development, but also about design, storytelling and community,” he says. “Telling stories with hotels is what I really love about this work.” A good thing, given the Ennismore pipeline to mid-2024 is ambitious enough to give any executive an ulcer. 

Gleneagles Townhouse, a jewel-box city cousin to the country sporting estate, opened in Edinburgh last June, with a members- and hotel-guests-only bar on the roof of the listed former bank building, and a spa in its basement that offers infrared saunas and Barbara Sturm facials (Sturm’s is another business Bharti Pasricha has invested in). In February, I stayed at the new Hoxton, Shepherd’s Bush, its 237 rooms housed in a seven-storey newbuild overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green. The fourth Hoxton in London, it toes the brand storyline perfectly, from the excellent British-roasted coffee in the room (but no minibar, because why pay extra?), to the playlists (curated by Rough Trade – “the ultimate OG, as London as it gets”, says Pasricha), to the all-day Thai street food/diner hybrid restaurant.

This spring, Ennismore opened Maison Delano in Paris, the first property in a new brand spun off from Ian Schrager’s iconic Delano Hotel in Miami. A second Maison Delano will follow in Seoul in 2026; price-wise, the brand will sit at the top end of the Ennismore stable, with rooms from €765. In the summer, the Mondrian Singapore will open in the island city’s culture-rich Tanjong Pagar neighbourhood. 25hours will take its flamboyant ethos to Sydney and, rather surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, as part of the Neom development. “Lifestyle isn’t ‘hire a fancy designer, recruit tattooed bartender, press play’,” says Pasricha. “What I love [about Ennismore brands] is that they all have very clear points of view. You or I might not love it, but it’s a POV. And most of them have a really authentic founder. A big part of my role at Ennismore now is championing those founders, making sure I can unblock more opportunities for them.”

That’s just a taster of the 160 hotels Ennismore has under development. But it’s what Pasricha likes doing best. “I’ve always been an operator,” he says. “I was always a commercially minded guy who happens to also love product. It could be, you know, lederhosen” – he laughs – “or leather jackets, or a hotel, an asset. But always that intersection of gross margins and profit and cash flows with beautiful things. I’ve never been an actual creative, nor was I ever a CFO. But I love sitting in the places where those roles intersect.” As a sport of nature naturally would. 

ennismore.com. Estelle Manor opens on 15 May; rooms from £550

Pasricha’s world: from Shoreditch to Saudi Arabia

2012

The Hoxton, Shoreditch
Bought it in 2012, immediately set to reinventing it — and thus begat the international chain that today all but owns the style-value axis in hospitality.

2015

Eggbreak, Notting Hill
Pasricha’s first independent restaurant — a takeover of a local Thai joint — proposed a simple theme: eggs all day, any way. Now it’s W8’s and W11’s go-to for Saturday shakshuka.

2015

Gleneagles
His wife had happy memories of family holidays at the tucked-away (and slightly tired) Scottish sporting estate; together they parlayed it into one of Britain’s plushest kid-friendly resorts.

2021 

Maison Estelle
Seven storeys of members-only glamour in Mayfair. (If you have to ask, etc.)

2023

Maison Delano Paris
Inspired by the Delano story, it’s the flagship of a new, top-flight Ennismore brand.

next up

25hours Neom Mountain
Whereby Germany’s rollicking young party-hotel portfolio rocks up in… Saudi Arabia. Watch this space.