Tony Tompkins, VP of design and construction at Atlantis Paradise Island Resort in the Bahamas, is planning to attend Hotec Design, an annual conference presented by Questex Hospitality, the parent company of Hotel Management. At the conference, buyers like Tompkins will meet one-on-one with hospitality-focused suppliers to learn about new products and services and to keep up to date on emerging trends.
Tompkins started in banking before he turned to design, after friends and colleagues asked him to help create their homes. “I ended up leaving banking and ended up opening up a high-end residential design firm,” he recalled. After working on residential designs, the firm began working on hospitality projects.
Looking back, Tompkins said he loved the budgets and creativity he found designing residential projects. “At the level of what I was doing … budgets really didn't matter much,” he said. “It was kind of a carte blanche thing to do.” On the other hand, creating residential spaces made him into an ad hoc family therapist, and he began looking for other kinds of projects. Once he had worked on a few restaurants, he came to appreciate the faster pace of hospitality design.
Tompkins joined the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas as the property’s design director and suddenly found himself in a decidedly different world. “Usually, even if you have eight, 10, 12 homes going at once, it's nothing like working for a large property and having 40 or 50 projects,” he said. He learned about finding contract-grade materials and what kinds of fabrics and furniture are safe to use in a home but not appropriate for a hotel. “So that was a learning curve,” he said. He also had to build relationships with different suppliers to make sure he could get what he needed when he needed it.
Bahamas Bound
When Brookfield Asset Management sold the Hard Rock to Virgin Hotels in 2018, the company invited Tompkins to move to the Bahamas and become head of design for its Atlantis Resort there, and he traded in the desert of Nevada for the tropics. When he accepted the job, he figured if he lasted two years, he would have done well. “I told myself if I could last three years. I [would] really achieve what I was going for. And now I've hit four, and I'm nowhere near feeling like I've even cracked the surface because there's so much going on.”
In his role at Atlantis, Tompkins oversees all elements of design for the 170-acre, 3,805-room property. “Anything that has to do with a fabric, a paint color, a tile, a pillow, uniform—anything on this property—anything—it has to go through my office.”
He also hires and manages third-party design firms for the larger projects—“I have my own internal team here to do internal projects, depending on the size.” The resort, he said, is “kind of its own little city” that is constantly going through remodels and updates. “It’s kind of [keeping] all the balls in the air, going at the same time. So it can be a lot.”
One significant hurdle is shipping materials to an island. “Everything has to go through our freight forwarder, then through customs. So if you FedEx me a package, it can take up to two weeks even if it was sent overnight.” Fortunately, Tompkins works closely with the resort’s logistics manager who handles things “from start to finish,” and sometimes has things shipped to his home or office in Florida so that he can bring them back to Atlantis himself.
Tompkins estimates that Atlantis has about three or four “really large projects” that are about 70 percent completed and should be completed over the next two to three years. But even then, he said, there is always something big coming up at Atlantis. “I would want to look back and say, ‘You know, I put my mark on this property. It's significantly different [from] when I got here,’ and I feel like only then would I even entertain thinking about leaving—and maybe not even then, you know.”
Tompkins has had “some really good luck” at smaller conferences like Hotec Design. “I appreciate the ability to really have a one-on-one,” he said. While he enjoys larger conferences, he lamented the lack of establishing real connections with exhibitors. “You never really get to sit down and talk with somebody about the product,” he said. At smaller conferences, he can “preselect” the things he wants to learn more about. “And so you get that 15 minutes of just really getting to ask questions and seeing if what you're looking for is the right fit. I've come out of there with some great relationships that I use a lot.” Beyond face-to-face meetings, he said the social networking at events can help people build stronger—and more personal—relationships. “That's just an extra layer of relationship-building that I think is really important in our industry.”
The 2022 Hotec Design conference will take place June 20-23 at the Breakers Palm Beach in Florida. Registration is open for both buyers and suppliers.