Mauritius · Hospitality
Grand Baie is still a hotel with no memories attached to it when we first step inside. Opening day is months away. Ashish Modak is then General Manager, with Ashok Bhugoo beside him. The spaces are almost finished. Teams are finding their footing; the restaurants already have character. Soon, the first guests will give them their hours, habits and memories. That is where our story with LUX* begins.
The brand
A different way to celebrate
LUX* was born in Mauritius around a purpose that fits into a few words: helping guests celebrate life. The landmark moments and the simple ones alike, the moments that give a stay its memories.
The Lux Collective has built several brands that deliberately do not tell the same story. LUX* sets out to make the extraordinary happen. SALT brings travellers closer to people and place. Tamassa puts the pleasure of being together at the centre.
Behind that variety lies a deeper conviction: different people, destinations and moments call for different ways of welcoming.
Across the six Mauritian properties we accompany, spanning LUX*, SALT and Tamassa, that conviction takes on a different face at every address.
Grand Baie moves at a livelier pace, with a more social energy and a natural pull towards couples. Belle Mare opens itself generously to families and children. Le Morne gives more room to nature, slowness and calm. Grand Gaube is shaped by leisure, movement and days that stretch out.
One hospitality score, with its own variations.
The project
Before the first guests
We step into LUX* Grand Baie several months before it opens.
The hotel already exists in its lines, materials and volumes. Around it, everything is still being written. Teams are coming together, uses are becoming clearer, spaces are beginning to find their character.
People still speak in the future tense, in possibilities. About what Grand Baie is going to become.
About how to bring to life spaces designed with enough personality to stand on their own. About an ambition then new to Mauritius: a hotel bringing luxury and lifestyle together.
Ashish is leading the opening. Ashok is at his side. With them, then with the teams gradually taking possession of the hotel, we enter that movement too.
Decisions still move freely. An idea can shift a use. A detail can change the way a place will be lived in. Habit has not settled over anything yet.
This is the moment in which our relationship with LUX* takes shape.
We arrived before the memories, when Grand Baie still belongs to the people imagining it, building it, preparing it.
Grand Baie’s score begins to be written.
© The Lux* Collective
Sound identity
A shared story
Mauritius is where it begins.
The island has been shaped by the movement of people, languages and cultures. The Mascarene Islands, East Africa, India, Asia and Europe have met there for centuries. Their influences mingle, shift, transform and keep generating new forms.
Music carries that history.
LUX*’s sound identity begins there: in a shared cultural geography broad enough to connect the properties, alive enough to evolve with each one.
Grand Baie becomes its first expression, with its lifestyle energy. At Belle Mare, that musical territory meets families. At Le Morne, it breathes more freely with nature. At Grand Gaube, it moves.
This is how LUX*’s sound identity is built: a shared musical story, followed by variations that give each property its own musical character.
A shared culture, unfolding in many ways.
Programming
Stories in the making
Grand Baie, Belle Mare, Grand Gaube, Le Morne. From one property to the next, the music holds; its harmonics shift from space to space.
Grand Baie
At Beach Rouge, you come to stay. You come to take your time. The music is made for it.
You hear Blood Groove & Kikis, Jones Meadow, Valante.
A bass line surfaces beneath the voices. Another line stretches out, almost disappears, then returns further on. Indie electronic slips into the space that has opened up, without jolting or interrupting anything. Tracks unfold in long washes, supple lines, motifs that return like a pleasant thought with no reason to chase it away.
Belle Mare
At Amari, a string resonates. A melody unspools its memory, loops and carries on.
Anoushka Shankar, Ganesha and Prem Joshua embody an ancient India meeting the modernity of electronic timbres and inflections.
The centuries do not disappear; they draw closer.
Grand Gaube
At INTI, electric guitars seize the ear. A motif returns; the percussion underlines it. An electric line bends, starts again, insists.
Cumbia and Peruvian chicha have a very particular way of driving the melody forward while leaving a trail of colour behind.
Bareto, La Lom and Los Shapis paint it in sound.
Le Morne
The Beach comes at the end of the journey.
The opening bars anchor us in the Mauritian lagoon. Voices and rhythms carry the breath of the Mascarenes through Blakkayo, Kaya and Tine Poppy.
One identity, branching out.
© The Lux* Collective
Governance
The time to return
We return to Mauritius every year. Or perhaps Mauritius returns to us; we are no longer entirely sure.
Ashok, whom we first knew beside Ashish at Grand Baie, now welcomes us at Le Morne. Stephan, once at Grand Gaube, is now waiting for us at Grand Baie. Big Papa, whom we also met at Grand Baie, reappears at Le Morne.
Over lunch with Stephan at Beach Rouge in Grand Baie, the threads cross, branch off and pick one another up.
Between trips, the conversations continue at a distance.
Then comes the time to return to Mauritius. Familiar faces are there; others become familiar, and the memory of past choices begins to feed what comes next.
The LUX* repertoire keeps growing.
“Every hotel celebrates the culture, people, nature and flavours of its destination.”
LUX*