The question was not what to put on the walls. The question was what the walls of a Fairmont in Hanoi should say to a guest who had seen hotel art in forty cities and learned to stop looking.

The answer was lacquerwork.

Partly because it is Vietnamese, but mostly because lacquer is one of the few mediums that rewards time. It reveals itself slowly. A guest who pauses at a lacquer piece on arrival will notice something on their second day that they could not have seen on the first, because the depth only emerges with the right angle of light, with a second look, with the stillness that comes once the bags have been set down and the day has been put aside.

This is the distinction between decoration and a curated artistic program. Decoration asks to be noticed once. A collection gives the guest something to return to.

The scale of the Fairmont commission — over five hundred pieces across the property — raised a curatorial question that most people frame as a logistical one: how do you maintain coherence at that volume?

Our answer was to make the medium the narrative. Vietnamese lacquerwork in its traditional form involves a process of layering — typically twenty to thirty coats applied and sanded over weeks, each coat invisible to the final eye but structurally essential to the surface that eventually emerges. The finished piece is not its top layer. It is everything underneath. We built the collection around this same logic. No single piece is the point. The accumulation is.

The works range from intimate guestroom formats, scaled for a room a guest will sleep in, to public area pieces built for the long sightlines and brief encounters of the lobby. But all of them are part of the same conversation: the relationship between surface and depth, between what is immediately visible and what takes time to arrive.

The practical challenge of five hundred pieces in eight weeks is real. It required a production network built on existing relationships with craftspeople in Hanoi workshops we had worked with before, whose quality we could vouch for and whose timelines we understood. It required a curatorial eye applied not just to selection but to quality control at volume, to the decisions that get made when a piece arrives and is not quite right and there is no time to start again.

What we learned, and have carried into every commission since, is that coherence at scale is a curatorial commitment rather than an aesthetic problem. It is made before the first piece is commissioned, held through every production decision, and visible in the finished property to anyone who knows what to look for.

The guests at the Fairmont Hanoi may not know what they are looking at. They will know that it is worth looking at. That is what a considered artistic program does.

The risk, when working in a place as visually rich as Sapa, is the shortcut.

Sapa offers the eye almost everything it could want: mountains in every condition of light and weather, terraced rice fields that have been photographed ten thousand times and still arrest attention, ethnic minority communities with centuries of textile tradition, a quality of mist that photographers make careers of. A hotel art programme could reach for any of these and produce something that reads as locally responsive. It would not be wrong. But it would not be specific. And specificity is the only honest form of cultural intelligence.

The Hyatt Regency Sapa commission began with a decision to ground the entire artistic programme in one cultural tradition, the textile practices of the Hmong people, and to go deep rather than wide. We took one entry point and pursued it until it yielded something genuinely original.

What Hmong textile practice offers a curatorial eye is a sophisticated grammar.

Indigo dye is extracted from the plant, fermented, and applied in layered submersions over days and weeks. It produces a blue that is not a single colour but a range of blues, each layer distinct to those who know how to read it. The depth of colour signals the depth of process. Batik, the wax-resist technique that creates the characteristic geometric motifs of Hmong textiles, works as a system: each motif carries meaning. The cumulative effect of an entire textile is a sentence, a record, a form of writing that predates writing.

We built the Hyatt Regency Sapa collection around this grammar rather than its surface. The visual reference is Hmong textile. The underlying logic of layering, pattern as meaning and accumulation as narrative became the artistic methodology applied across every zone of the property.

The collection is organised across two registers.

We called the first the pouring season: the contemplative, rain-heavy months that Sapa is known for, when the mist is present and the pace slows. This register informs the guest area programme: calm, inward, built for someone who is slowing down and arriving at something. The palette is cool. The compositions are held. The scale is intimate.

The second register is the blooming season: vivid, outward, the months when the terraces are green and the markets are full. This organises the public area programme: social spaces, F&B zones, arrival sequences. The palette opens. The scale expands.

A guest moving through the property, even without any knowledge of Hmong culture or the curatorial framework behind the collection, will experience a shift in emotional register as they move from their room to the lobby to dinner. From private to public, from internal to external, from contemplative to social. That shift is the art programme working correctly.

This is what specificity makes possible. A shortcut would have produced something that looked like Sapa. This produces something that thinks like it. Guests feel the difference, even when they could not say why.

Vietnam is often described to international audiences as a country with rich traditions. That undersells it.

The material culture here is civilisational. The bronze drums of the Đông Sơn are more than two thousand years old. The lacquer tradition of the Red River Delta traces back at least to the fifteenth century. Ceramics, silk, mother-of-pearl inlay, wood carving are each a continuous body of knowledge, passed hand to hand across generations, still alive in working villages an hour from where we sit.

This is the ground we work from. HOATAY is based in Vietnam, inside that tradition, and the work we make is shaped by it.

What rootedness gives the work

Depth is something a discerning guest can sense, even without naming it. A motif drawn from a reference image and a technique understood from the inside are two very different things.

Take sơn mài. It is a process more than a finish: each layer of lacquer must cure completely before the next is laid, and a single panel may pass through twenty or thirty layers, built up, sanded back and built again over weeks before anything is revealed. What a guest finally sees is depth that took months to make. You are, in a real sense, looking through layers of time.

That kind of understanding lives in the workshop, in relationships with master craftspeople built over years. It is the foundation of everything we curate.

What the guest is looking for

The contemporary luxury traveller is not isolated, and neither is their taste. They have stayed in Kyoto, in Marrakech, in Bali. When they arrive in Vietnam, they are looking for the thing that could only have been made here: art that gives a property a sense of place so specific it could not be lifted and installed anywhere else.

That is the standard we hold the work to. Refinement is the floor. The real question is simpler: could this have been made for any other hotel, in any other country? If the answer is yes, the work isn't finished.

Inside a project: Fairmont Hanoi

The brief was to translate the spirit of Thăng Long, Hanoi's thousand-year heritage, into work that honours tradition while feeling alive in a modern luxury hotel.

"Vietnamese" was the requirement, but it is not a simple one. It had to carry cultural memory without becoming folklore, imitation antique, or costume. We spent more time on that question than on any single piece.

The answer was material. We led with sơn mài, chosen less because it reads as Vietnamese than because it ages in the same direction as the building itself. It deepens rather than dates.

As one of the principal art suppliers, we delivered more than 500 artworks and 400 accessories across the property, from public areas and guest rooms to corridors and food and beverage outlets, in lacquer, metal, embroidery wallcovering, oil painting, and wood carving. The brief asked for cohesion. What we aimed for was the feeling that the art was always meant to be there.

From craft to contemporary

Vietnamese fine art grew out of this same lineage of lacquer, silk, ink and the disciplined hand. When we place a contemporary Vietnamese artist alongside traditional work, the two are speaking the same language. Our role is to compose the whole, so that the smallest object in a guest room and the signature piece in the lobby share one coherent idea.

A hotel's art is often the last line on the budget. It is frequently the only thing a guest remembers. Our work is to make sure that what they remember is rooted in where they are.

When a new brief arrives, we don't start by asking who should make it. We ask what the piece is trying to be, and whose hands already speak that language.

The difference matters. One question looks outward, toward a list of names. The other looks inward, toward the work itself. The work, it turns out, knows more than we do. If you sit with a brief long enough, it begins to point. Toward a region, a tradition, a way of working, a particular relationship between hand and material. Our task is to follow that pointing, not to override it with a decision we've already made.

A palette tells you something. A technique tells you something. The mood a space is reaching for tells you something. The weight of the commission — whether it is one piece or a hundred — tells you something else. All of this is language, and the brief is speaking it before we've said a word.

Take lacquer. In Vietnam, lacquer lives in two techniques. There is sơn ta — natural lacquer drawn from the sap of the lacquer tree, the traditional method of the North, built up in slow patient layers that need humidity to cure. And then there is what people loosely call "Japanese lacquer" — still Vietnamese craft, still the same layering by hand, but using imported industrial paint from Japan or Thailand that dries quickly in ordinary dry air. The name comes from where the paint is sourced, not from the tradition. The hands, the knowledge, the method passed down — all Vietnamese.

When a brief calls for a brighter palette, sơn ta cannot reach it. The colour has already told us where to look. When the timeline is tight — sơn ta cures slowly, week by patient week, and a production window doesn't always allow for that — the brief says it again, more clearly. It is less choosing than listening, following what the work asks for, toward the hands most likely to understand it.

Then the search begins. The same brief goes to several makers, with the same request, the same deadline, the same starting point. What comes back is never the same twice, which is the point. We are searching for sensibility, not testing performance. Whose natural aesthetic language is closest to what this brief is reaching toward? One maker moves toward fine detail. Another toward boldness of form. Another toward a restraint that suits a more minimal room. Each sample is a different reading of the same invitation, and some of those readings are simply closer to the spirit of what the work wants to be.

It feels closer to recognition than evaluation. Which hands have heard what this piece is trying to say? The sample that fits is not always the most technically impressive one. It is the one that feels, without forcing, like part of the project already, as though the maker understood something the brief never explicitly stated.

The practical realities arrive alongside all of this, and we carry them honestly. What we know of this client — how they see, what they have responded to in the past, the aesthetic instincts that show up even when they are not stated. What the operator's brand allows and what it doesn't. The season — because humidity, temperature, and rainfall shape what is genuinely possible within a given production window. The scale — because a maker who produces one extraordinary piece is not always the same maker who can sustain a hundred of them without something giving. These things matter, and we would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But they are the landscape navigated, not the direction travelled. They follow the curatorial decision. They do not lead it.

When the real work begins

Once a maker is chosen, the brief changes character. What began as a document of intentions becomes a conversation, and it runs both ways.

A maker who has worked a material for years knows things no brief can contain. They know where sơn ta can be pushed and where it will resist. They know what happens when a colour is taken to its limit, or when a traditional technique is asked to do something it has never done before. That knowledge is among the most valuable things they bring to the work.

So the brief is shared, and then the listening begins again. We listen for the maker's instinct, for the moments when they say, softly or directly: this could go further. This could be different. What if we tried this? Those moments are where the work grows beyond what either party imagined at the start. An idea that has passed through real hands, been tested against the limits of real materials, and come out the other side more alive than it entered. Something neither the brief nor the maker could have arrived at alone.

This creative exchange is the point of the process: the risk-taking, the experimental push, the willingness to let a maker's deep knowledge redirect the original idea. Selection is the beginning of the work, not the end.

What choosing really means

By the time a choice is made, the choosing has mostly already happened. The brief pointed toward a sensibility. The samples showed whose hands already held it. The practical realities confirmed what was possible. What remains is less a decision than a recognition, a yes to what the project has been reaching toward all along. Following, not imposing.

But underneath all of this, there is something that process alone cannot hold.

When we say yes to a maker, we carry their work, and their community, into a space they may never enter. Their hands will be in rooms where guests may not know their name, may not think about the studio or workshop two hours from the city, the artist or artisan who spent months building this up, layer by careful layer. That invisibility is part of what this work is. It does not make the choice feel light.

We think of it as an introduction between craft and the world it enters, between a place and the people whose hands made it possible. When it works, a guest feels something without being able to name it. And somewhere, a maker, or a whole community of makers, continues what they have always done, now part of a conversation much larger than itself.

Every brief deserves rigour. Every choice deserves care. We try never to separate the two.

When we walk into a hotel space for the first time, we try to arrive with nothing to say. We are not there to assess or to plan yet, only to listen to what the room is already saying before we have decided anything about it.

A finished space is never the work of one hand. By the time a guest walks in and feels something (calm, arrival, intimacy, ease), many people have already shaped that feeling. The architect who set the proportions. The interior designer who chose the materials and the light. The operator who understands, better than anyone, who will move through the space and what they will need from it.

Art arrives into a conversation already underway. This is something we hold close at HOATAY: we are not the first voice in a space, and we are not the loudest. We are often the last, so our work begins by listening.

Listening first

Before we propose anything, we spend time understanding what others have already set in motion. We walk the space at different hours when we can, because light changes a room entirely: what reads as calm in the morning can feel cold by afternoon. We notice where people slow down and where they pass through without looking up. We pay attention to how sound moves, where the eye naturally rests, what the architecture is reaching for beneath what is immediately visible.

We ask what the designer intended by this material, this restraint, this particular quality of stillness. We ask what the operator needs the room to hold at seven in the morning and again at midnight, because the same space must do very different things across a single day.

These are not questions we ask in order to overrule. They are questions we ask because everything that follows depends on the answers. The most useful thing an art consultant can do is arrive without ego, curious about what is already present, rather than eager to announce what they have brought.

The thread that ties

Art, placed well, is connective tissue. It is the thread that draws the architect's structure, the designer's surfaces, and the operator's purpose into a single, coherent feeling. Done poorly, art competes: it announces itself, pulls the eye away, joins a different conversation from the one the room is having. Done well, it completes the room so naturally that a guest cannot quite say why, only that something is right.

Restraint is part of this. Sometimes the most connective act is to add very little, or to leave something deliberately open. A wall that stays bare is not a wall we forgot. It is a breath the room needed. Knowing what not to place is the same skill as knowing what to place, and we try to hold both with equal care.

This is why we think of ourselves less as authors than as collaborators. The work that lasts is many hands in accord, making something none of them could have made alone.

A wider circle

But a place is larger than its rooms. A guest has not only arrived somewhere comfortable; they have arrived somewhere: a city, a coastline, a culture with its own hands and history. The most considered hotels understand that a stay is also a kind of introduction to a place.

This is where art does something that furniture cannot. A chair, however beautiful, gives comfort and form. A work of art carries the hand that made it: a particular person, a tradition, a material drawn from that ground. A small object, holding more than its size.

So our collaboration does not end with the design team. It reaches outward to the artists and makers of the place itself. We work with local hands wherever we can, because a piece made nearby connects the hotel to its destination, and the guest to the community whose culture they have, however briefly, come to be among.

And when we say yes to a maker, we are carrying their work into a space they may never enter themselves. Their hands will be present in a room where guests may not know their name, may not think about the studio or workshop where this was built, layer by careful layer. We hold that responsibility with care. It is one of the reasons the placing matters as much as the choosing.

Art becomes an introduction between the traveller and the place, and a way for the people of that place to remain present within it.

In good company

We are sometimes asked what makes a HOATAY project recognisable. The honest answer is that the best ones are not recognisable as ours at all. The art looks as though it grew from the same intention as everything around it, as though the architect, the designer, the operator, the artist, and the place itself had all been in the same room from the beginning.

This is why the best art disappears. It belongs so completely that you cannot imagine the space without it, or quite see where it ends and the room begins. It has stopped being an artwork placed inside a space and become part of what that space is, something that was always going to be there.

That is the whole ambition: for the space, and the city around it, to speak with one voice before anyone notices the art. And for that voice to sound as though it could only have come from here.