Mauritius · Hospitality
Grand Baie is still a hotel whose memories have yet to be made when we first step inside.
Opening day is months away. Ashish Modak is the General Manager at the time, with Ashok Bhugoo alongside him.The spaces are almost finished. Teams are finding their footing; the restaurants already have character. Soon, the first guests will fill them with their own rhythms, habits and memories.That is where our story with LUX* begins.
The brand
A different way to celebrate
LUX* was born in Mauritius with a purpose expressed in just 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 work with, spanning LUX*, SALT and Tamassa, that conviction takes a different form at each property.
Grand Baie moves at a livelier pace, with a more social energy and a natural pull towards couples. Belle Mare opens more fully 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 is already there in its lines, materials and volumes. Around it, everything is still being written. Teams are coming together, patterns of use are taking shape, 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 making the hotel their own, we enter that movement too.
Decisions still move freely. An idea can change how a space is used. A detail can alter the way a place will be experienced. Nothing has yet hardened into habit.
It is in this moment that our relationship with LUX* takes shape.
We arrived before the memories had formed, while Grand Baie still belonged 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 takes on a family rhythm. 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.
© The Lux* Collective
Programming
Stories in the making
Grand Baie, Belle Mare, Grand Gaube, Le Morne. From one property to the next, the music remains; its harmonics shift from space to space.
Grand Baie
At Beach Rouge, you come to linger. 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 electronica 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 a memory, loops and carries on.
Anoushka Shankar, Ganesha and Prem Joshua bring ancient India into dialogue with contemporary electronic timbres and inflections.
The centuries do not disappear; they draw closer.
Grand Gaube
At INTI, electric guitars catch the ear. A motif returns; the percussion picks it out. An electric line bends, returns, insists.
Cumbia and Peruvian chicha have a distinctive 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
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 met working alongside Ashish at Grand Baie, now welcomes us at Le Morne. Stephan, once at Grand Gaube, now welcomes 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 conversations cross, branch off and answer one another.
Between trips, the conversations continue from afar.
Then comes the time to return to Mauritius. Familiar faces are there; new ones soon become familiar too, and the memory of past choices begins to shape what comes next.
The LUX* repertoire keeps growing.
“Every hotel celebrates the culture, people, nature and flavours of its destination.”
LUX*
