Can individuality be scaled? Elie Khouri shares a blueprint for luxury hospitality from Dubai to Paros

Elie Khouri has spent much of his career doing something that successful executives often become reluctant to try: starting again. Across three decades, he helped build the Middle East media operations of Omnicom – the global marketing and communications group behind some of the world’s largest advertising and media agencies – from eight employees to more than 2,000. In 2017, Khouri embarked on a new chapter, founding Vivium, a Dubai-based office through which he invests in and builds businesses across property, hospitality, design and more.

At the age of 62, the French-Lebanese businessman is now in the middle of perhaps his most entrepreneurial chapter yet. In the past few years, Vivium has created boutique hotel brand Luura and design business Atelio. It has also expanded its luxury-property interests through a partnership with Sotheby’s International Realty and begun turning Khouri’s private collection of works by more than 300 artists into a public institution. What links them is his conviction that judgement, design and culture can be commercially valuable – and, more challengingly, scaled.

There’s a clue to Khouri’s approach within his home at Jumeirah Bay. He bought a mansion within the Bulgari Residences, gutted its interiors and – mirroring his career – started again. Vintage Brazilian furniture and contemporary art now sit together according to his own precise edit. Khouri insists that he’s not starting afresh. “I don’t reinvent myself,” he says. “I always keep building on what I’ve learnt.”

He believes that he was behaving entrepreneurially long before he began deploying his own capital through Vivium. At Omnicom, he launched a digital business in 2000, created new ventures within the group and devised ways to retain talented staff, including giving Rolexes to high performers. His willingness to toss out conventional playbooks defines Vivium. Rather than treating its investment areas as separate asset classes, Khouri sees an ecosystem. Property teaches him about place and architecture; design adds materials and craftsmanship; art supplies cultural depth. Combine them, he says, and you have a hotel, a showroom or an art institution.

Luura is the clearest test. Its first property, a 39-suite hotel in Paros, opened this summer. Khouri had originally travelled to Greece intending to develop and sell villas but found the proposition strangely unsatisfying. “What’s the point in doing beautiful things and then letting go of them?” he asks. He’s betting that travellers are tiring of standardised luxury. “The big brands are losing because they become too commercial, too much the same – copy and paste.” The difficulty is whether something that’s deliberately individual can be scaled. Khouri wants dozens of Luuras but has refused to franchise the brand. Instead, he intends to retain an ownership interest in every hotel.

Another recent venture, Atelio, applies that philosophy to furniture, art and collectable design. Its A/P Room platform also has a wider ambition: to give designers from the Middle East and North Africa a vehicle to become known (and, crucially, sell) beyond the region. Meanwhile, he hopes that the Elie Khouri Art Foundation, which is currently being developed in the UAE, will turn two decades of private collecting into a public-facing institution, giving something back to the country in which he has lived for 35 years. He credits the nation with giving him the “freedom to be an entrepreneur”.

Khouri thinks that though the UAE is respected for property, tourism, commerce and culture, Europe still does not regard it as “a place for ideas”. He wants the next generation of businesses in the Emirates to export concepts rather than merely import them. Luura is already looking beyond Greece to Italy and Spain, while a second Paros property and an Athens outpost are in development.

By his own admission, Khouri no longer needs to work. But his appetite is far from diminished. “The question is not about making money,” he says. “The question is about making a difference. I will not stop because I always want to create something and make it amazing.” Perhaps, then, his entrepreneurship isn’t about starting over – it’s more to do with never quite being finished.