From the Studio
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.
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.
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.
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. Sơn mài was set as the hotel's language by the design team, less because it reads as Vietnamese than because it ages in the same direction as the building itself. It deepens rather than dates. Our work was to carry that language through the property, piece by piece.
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.
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.