SITTING with Susan Harmsworth in the sunny breakfast solarium at Gleneagles Hotel, she leans over and brushes my cheek. "You really need a facial," she says gently, sympathetically. Coming from her, it doesn't sound like an insult, although it does s
ound like a salespitch: Harmsworth sells spas.
She is the founder and driving force of Espa, a renowned spa design and management company as well as high-end spa product manufacturer based in Surrey.
In February, she became partly owned by a leading Dubai sovereign wealth fund, which means her already global luxury brand is about to go platinum.
Her company has developed and manages more than 50 high-end Espa-branded spas all over the world and had input into countless others, including the One Spa in Edinburgh, the Golf Club at Loch Lomond and the spa at the Turnberry in Ayr. She is in Scotland to celebrate the recent completion of Gleneagles's new spa. It already had one, but it no longer met the demand.
Harmsworth and designer Amanda Rosa, who is married to the Scots hotelier Ken McCulloch, were drafted in to create the sort of spa, featuring thermal pools, walls of light and wafts of the finests essential oils that fulfils all the pampering desires of the already pampered clientele of Gleneagles.
Of the £18 million Gleneagles has earmarked to spend sprucing the old place up for the Ryder Cup in 2014, half has been spent creating a "destination" spa, double the size of the old one, and a new market-garden style restaurant. Patrick Elsmie, Gleneagles' managing director has knownHarmsworth for a number of years and says he would not have thought of using any other spa brand.
"We really wanted to use Sue's expertise," he explains. "It was going to be very important for the renaissance of the hotel.
"Sue has been at the very forefront of this industry and time has given her an enormous amount of experience. That is why she understands what the customer wants and how the flow should work in a spa."
Even before the Dubai ruling family took a stake in her company, Espa was a global brand.
Generally, the spa business is growing exponentially, particularly in areas not always associated with the luxury end of the market. Exclusive, high-end developments are cropping up across South America, eastern Europe, the Far East and China.
Although her company is still a niche operator with a relatively modest turnover of £7m and 100 employees, Harmsworth alone has 60 new projects in the pipeline. After Scotland, she is flying out to Tenerife, then to Dubai, then Beijing.
Everyone wants a piece of the action, especially land speculators driven out of western Europe and the US's steamy and now plummeting property markets. "Croatia is going berserk," says Harmsworth.
"Jupiter Capital are investing a lot there. We are developing a six-storey spa in Riga later this year. It will be one of the top five in Europe.
"In Latvia and Lithuania, they haven't started with the real five star – maybe four star- plus, but not five-five star. You don't see Four Seasons, Mandarin or the Ritz there yet, but they have got Radisson and Hilton and Hyatt. It will be another couple of years before they get into those."
She's coy about what the 40 per cent stake in Espa taken by Istithmar World Capital will mean for her business, but the projects they have in the pipeline are almost limitless in their potential.
Istithmar is Arabic for "investment". It is also the venture capital arm of Dubai World, owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the prime minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of the second richest emirate, Dubai.
The oil wealth of six of the Gulf states, including Dubai, are estimated to make up at least half the value of the soveriegn wealth funds currently held in the world – which totals about £17 trillion.
Sheikh Mohammed is known for his love of horseracing, but he is also spending significantly on hospitality leisure and wellness. In 2006, the same fund acquired luxury resort developer Kerzener International for $3.9bn (£2bn). The fund also bought Bumrungrad Hospital, a leading private hospital in Thailand that mixes the latest in traditional western medicine with holistic treatment.
For Harmsworth, they were the right people to join forces with: "I feel they are a very good partner – they are very interested in health and wellness."
And Harmsworth knows a thing or two about that. Although she looks like she could be in her late 40s or early 50s, she is 63 and has been in the business since the 1970s. A former beauty journalist, she pioneered the concept of the beauty-day spa in the unswinging city of Toronto, Canada in 1968. When she came back to the UK, she ran a combined medical and health spa.
As people become increasingly health conscious, this is the way Harmsworth sees the market going. "As the national health system here crumbles, and certainly in the US it is crumbling, people have to take more ownership of their health and complementary wellness and prevention."
Spas may be big business, but Harmsworth won't work for just anyone. "I sometimes tell people if you are not going to do it properly, don't do it. Becuase people's expectations now are so high, if you do tokenism it won't be successful – there's too many choices."
For Gleneagles, the spa is an easy choice, bringing in customers in the off-season. She adds: "With a lot of resorts like this, especially winter months historically have not been easy. Spas make a huge difference."
The full article contains 959 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
