When I spoke with Anneke Brown, she was general manager of COMO The Treasury in Perth, Australia. She came up under Guy Heywood at Amankila in Indonesia, and the way she describes that apprenticeship is one of the clearest mentor portraits in the book. The book notes that she has since become Managing Director of Tourism Western Australia.
Brown speaks to two things in The Luxury of Attention. The first is what a mentor actually does. Heywood, she told me, taught her everything he knew about the luxury guest experience, supported her through the ranks, and gave her her first general manager role. The second is what a property owes a guest when an experience breaks. Brown keeps a short list of what a luxury hotel must not do in that moment, and at the top of it sits the gesture most properties reach for first: the note of apology and the bottle of wine sent to the room. In her account that gesture rarely solves anything. It is the property talking about itself. What she practices instead is personal attention, a direct conversation with the guest, and enough care over the details that the solution fits the problem.
“When a luxury experience goes wrong, you need to correct it, and compensate without question.” Anneke Brown, then general manager, COMO The Treasury
In the book, Anneke Brown appears in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, where her account of Guy Heywood stands alongside the other mentor stories from my interviews, and in Chapter 10, The Recovery, where her correction without question opens the chapter and sets its posture: the property turning toward the guest at the precise moment most operations turn away. The chapter returns to her at its close, placing her alongside Axel Bethke, Silvestri and Graef as four stations of one discipline.
On Heywood, she put the debt simply.
“He saw the talent within me early on and nurtured it over many years.” Anneke Brown, then general manager, COMO The Treasury