The Man Behind Aman
It’s no small thing to work with Kengo Kuma. The architect has, among other things, recently designed Japan National Stadium, one of the main venues for the now delayed 2020 Summer Olympics. Vladislav Doronin commissioned him to design a skin-care bottle. It might seem too insignificant to matter, but it speaks to the Aman chairman and CEO’s ability to wave his hand and suddenly be working with one of the biggest architects in the world, even for something as mundane as the packaging of a branded body mist. But for Doronin these details—from the bottle’s curved shape to its soft, vein-like patterns—are all-important.
His go-to list of architects has taken time to grow; he has been adding names since his days developing commercial and residential real estate in Moscow in the 1990s. “I had to convince the mayor and the city planners to let me bring in foreign architects,” he says. “It was a bit controversial. They didn’t want it. I told them, ‘I’m not going to build for the moment. We can learn from the western architects’ process.’ ”
Doronin’s introduction to Aman, the five-star-hotel chain that he would helm years later, happened even earlier,
