Interview with Mr. Adrian Rudin, General Manager NUO Hotel Beijing
An industry veteran with more than 30 years of global luxury hospitality experience, Adrian Rudin, a Swiss national, has previously held general management and senior leadership positions at Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and Peninsula Hotel Group. Now, as the General Manager of NUO Hotel Beijing, he is leading the NUO Hotel team in establishing and maintaining international standards, while adapting them to the principles of NUO etiquette, including the development of the “Chinese Entourage” concept originated from the Ming Dynasty.
With an appetite for challenge and adventure, Mr. Rudin pursues a diverse range of interests. He enjoys the thrill of skydiving, skiing and mountain climbing, and has even reached base camp at Mount Everest. He is also an avid aficionado of Chinese cuisine and culture. In this issue, SpaChina talked with him.
Is there any special meaning in the brand name “NUO”?
Our brand derives its name from the Chinese characters “诺金” (Nuo Jin) meaning “the golden promise”. NUO Hotel is one of the country’s first homegrown five-star hotel brands and is committed to serving as a custodian of traditional Chinese culture. We drew inspiration from China’s more than 5,000 years of history and cultural heritage regarding hotel design, decoration, guest experience… Our brand logo is a Chinese vase, which represents hospitality and prosperity.
As the first five-star flagship hotel of NUO brand, NUO Hotel Beijing artfully combines refined scholar culture of China’s ancient Ming Dynasty with modern arts lifestyle, offering guests an elegant, classical, artistic mild luxury experience.
What is NUO brand’s core philosophy?
NUO Hotels’ core philosophies are encapsulated by four key brand pillars: Chinese, Luxury, Contemporary and Green. Each NUO hotel will have a distinctive theme and style based on the hotel location’s history and cultural background. And each will be a showcase of a unique aspect of traditional Chinese culture or history of the property’s location.
At the same time, the hotel also serves as a contemporary art destination in its own right, with delicate artworks in the hotel lobby, guest rooms and suites, food & beverage outlets, including four exclusive, custom-created artworks by Zeng Fanzhi, who is considered by international art experts as “China’s greatest living artist”.
As for the “green” pillar, in keeping with NUO Hotels’ commitment to “low-carbon green intelligence”, NUO Hotel Beijing is equipped with a sophisticated air-purification system, which serves to reduce air-conditioning and heating wastage in the hotel. The hotel has stayed faithful to the “green building” template, carefully adhering to gold-level certification standards in LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design Building Rating System).
How does NUO Hotel Beijing celebrate the depth and richness of Chinese culture?
Threading a common design inspiration throughout NUO Hotel Beijing are symbolic heritage footprints of the Ming Dynasty’s most renowned scholars and philosophers, artists, poets and calligraphers, innovators and explorers. For instance, guests can feel a kind of prosperous air favored by Ming Dynasty’s intellectual Zhang Dai in the hotel lobby, feel the refined elegance of writer Wen Zhenheng and poet Wen Zhengming in the guest rooms, appreciate free and easy style paintings of calligrapher and painter Xu Wei in Jia, the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, and savor the tea ceremony and culture favored by prince-turned-philosopher Zhu Quan in our Yuan Tea House. All in all, relaxed, elegant and tasty lifestyle of Ming Dynasty’s scholars and philosophers can be felt in almost every corner of the hotel.
Who are NUO Spa’s target guests?
What are the highlights of NUO Spa?
Not every hotel guest will be our spa guest. As such, Nuo spa targets both hotel guests and local clients in order to secure the maximum amount of RevPOR.
At Nuo spa, modern wellness practices and traditional Chinese culture are combined to create unique and well-rounded treatments for each and every individual’s needs. A series of innovative and restorative treatments were designed in accordance with the concept of seasons change and yin-yang change stated in “Huangdi Neijing”, a well-known ancient Chinese medicine masterpiece also named “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon”. While enjoying spa treatment, guests can listen to a compilation of soothing music exclusively composed for NUO Spa – “ Aqua mix incense”, which is inspired by the concept of the water section in Li Shizhen’s “Compendium of Medical Material”.
Currently, our most popular treatment is the Nuo Fusion Massage. It fuses techniques from a variety of massages like Chinese acupressure massage, Deep Tissue massage, Thai massage, Swedish massage, Balinese massage, to create a combination of healing protocols and therapeutic experience in one session; and it enables you to enjoy the best of both worlds – East and West.
