WWe thought we were very close to happiness, we couldn’t help it, even though a human question was haunting our heads unanswered. A private plane had taken us to our private villa on this private island, and the sun had just set on our private beach all to ourselves in the South Pacific Ocean. As if by magic, the torches in our private Garden of Eden were lit and, as if by magic, the champagne supplies were replenished day by day, no matter how much of the fine rosé from the Duval-Leroy house we drank.
Our beach was a hundred meters wide, beautifully decorated with coconut palms and dilos, the Fijian trees of a thousand virtues, with a yoga desk and love bed, palm straw pavilion and canopy loungers. And we didn’t have to share all this with a soul, like Adam and Eve you could spend your entire vacation here. The pool, unlike most luxury resorts, wasn’t an alibi paddling pool, but a veritable pool with a pebble mosaic so pretty it looked like it had been designed by David Hockney. The villa, in front of which our own golf cart waited, was twice the size of our apartment at home, the mirror in the boudoir alone was five square meters, and the bathtub must have weighed a ton because it was a giant chunk of lava that had been hollowed out and polished. And all this abundance inevitably led us to the all-important question: Can happiness be bought?
From multimillionaire to multibillionaire
The cheapest villa at the Como Laucala Island Resort in the extreme northeast of Fiji costs five thousand six hundred dollars all inclusive – per night. That’s a lot of money, for which you don’t get a hotel room, but a temporary home and the story of a dream come true. It started with the heirs of the eccentric American multi-millionaire Malcolm Forbes wanting to get rid of his private island and the no less idiosyncratic Austrian multi-billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, the co-founder of Red Bull, desperately wanted a private island. He bought the island unseen in 2003, had all the buildings of the Forbes family demolished and, with crazy effort, built twenty-five villas in the north of the island next to his own residence, which he has otherwise left completely untouched. It is said to have been the largest private investment in Fiji for decades, at times a thousand construction workers populated Laucala, and five years later one of the most exclusive resorts on the planet was ready, which of course only handpicked guests were allowed to enter.
An iconographic image on social media for a long time: the resort’s central pool with its glass cube.
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Bild: Like Laucala Island Resort
Until the pandemic, Mateschitz ran his hotel himself because for him Laucala is an affair of the heart, his private paradise and not the trophy of a bored billionaire. He spends two months a year on the island, not even a single branch of a tree can be bent without his consent, and until recently he even took care of the menus at his resort, which, given the huge investment, despite the monumental room prices will never make money. That’s what the luxury group Como from Singapore wants, however, which took over the management last December and included Laucala as the crown jewel in its exclusive collection of fifteen treasures from hotels on three continents. Behind Como is Christina Ong, one of the most successful business women in Singapore and one of the richest women in the world, who made her first money in fashion and today also does it in restaurants, spas and all sorts of other things in life – and who believes herself the senior staff of the resort, just as passionately as Dietrich Mateschitz is interested in all the details of this treasure.