Why Alessandro Sartori May Be Menswear’s Most Distinctive Designer
The creative embraces his customers’ personal style via a sophisticated palette and languid textiles.
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When I met Alessandro Sartori a little over a year ago, the first thing that strikes me, under the searing sun on the shadeless rooftop of Shanghai’s Middle House hotel on a 90-degree day, is that the Zegna atistic director is clad head to toe in black. It’s not entirely out of the ordinary in an industry where often dogmatic designers can be easily caricatured by their uniforms (Karl Lagerfeld’s high-collared, heavily starched shirts, Yohji Yamamoto’s omnipresent trilby). But curiously, for Sartori, his choice of dress is neither a costume nor a direct reflection of the aesthetic of the 115-year-old Italian brand that he has led since 2016. “It helps me to think,” says the 58-year-old designer, whose Instagram bio declares, “I am a colourist but I always wear black.”
The second thing that makes an impression is how composed Sartori is—remarkably Zen even—mere hours before a major show. He is curious and thoughtful, carving out time to explore during work trips like this one, and he’s rarely without his Leica M10. On this particular afternoon, he is marvelling at the post-pandemic sartorial shift in the region, as witnessed on a recent flight from Chengdu to Hong Kong. “Before Covid, it was all loud logos and even louder garments,” he says. “I was sitting there watching, and people around me were wearing Arc’teryx, wearing Zegna, wearing monochrome, and wearing technical shoes with suits. And I said, ‘Where are we? Is it New York or London?’ ” There’s also little hint of big designer ego: When I suggest that perhaps he is underestimating the impact of Zegna on those changing tastes, as it was the first luxury brand to establish a boutique in mainland China, back in 1991, he demurs.
But make no mistake, he’s every inch a company man. Sartori’s ties to Zegna run deep. He joined in 1989 as a recent graduate of Milan’s Istituto Marangoni, working as a menswear designer. In 2003, he became the creative director of Z Zegna, which targeted a younger customer with more modern sensibilities. He remained in that role, firmly establishing the diffusion line’s identity, until 2011, when he was named artistic director of Paris-based Berluti, to which his command of colour was well suited. He assumed Zegna’s top creative post five years later. Since then, he has been refining his vision for clothing that, despite the brand’s rather rigid past, looks like nothing else on the market today—fervent efforts from copycats be damned.
As the fall-winter 2025 lineup now hitting stores and the recently revealed spring-summer 2026 collection demonstrate, his is not a pin-sharp, wrinkle-free interpretation of luxury but a far more soulful approach that encourages men to blend cherished wardrobe pieces with fresh acquisitions over time.
“I’m watching how my clients are styling, living, travelling, thinking, and working,” Sartori tells me not long after presenting his latest collection. “I need to be always plugged-in. It’s very important to be into your own community because today in fashion you can’t dictate anything any longer. It is now about offering a full proposal with meaning and being able to surprise in a good way. If you think you can dictate by pushing products that are overdesigned, through blind trust, you will go nowhere because those years are gone.”
If there was an aha moment for Sartori, it was the fall-winter 2021 collection. Designed at the height of the pandemic, the elegantly supple clothes made clear that the designer was in tune with his customers and was charting a new course for Zegna. The finishing touch: the momentous dropping of “Ermenegildo” from the brand’s name to better align with the stock-ticker symbol, ZGN, on the occasion of its I.P.O.
“While many wondered how to approach fashion during such a seismic event, Alessandro was more than ready to meet the moment,” says stylist Julie Ragolia, a longtime collaborator. “Clothes are the closest things we hold to our bodies, to our hearts. Deciding to work entirely in cashmere for that collection was bold, but also precise. He built at once a sense of armor and comfort at a time when people needed that most from their wardrobe. Understanding that link has always been Alessandro Sartori’s science. But being able to express this through the medium of film [in the absence of runway shows] allowed a more widespread audience to witness the brilliance of how his mind works.”
It’s a science that many a brand is doing its darnedest to study. Imitators abound, and the number of riffs I saw on the best-selling elasticised Triple Stitch sneakers and moccasin loafers at both the Pitti Uomo trade show and in Milan showrooms could justify keeping several intellectual-property attorneys on retainer.
But the fact is, no one is doing what Sartori is doing. Perhaps not since Giorgio Armani shook up the industry with his fluid tailoring in the 1980s has there been such a sustained, singular vision in menswear, though Ragolia cites Rick Owens as another directional, influential creator. “And Thom Browne revealed the ankle, changing tailoring forever,” she adds. “But Alessandro Sartori, he changed the way people dress as a mindset. That’s an impact that is incalculable.”
When I catch up with Sartori via Zoom on a recent summer evening, he is en route to a dinner with his car club, Oca Rossa, in the northern Italian countryside. He insists on pulling over to send a photo of his ride, a 1972 Porsche 911 Targa. It’s just one vintage automobile in a collection so impressive that he created Milano Garage to house it, then invited other discerning collectors to rent space there. Cars also present Sartori with another opportunity to experiment with hue. “In order to enjoy colours, I need to be hiding behind the screen,” he says, or in this case, behind the wheel. “My car tonight is signal orange, which is pretty strong.” He, on the other hand, is all in black.
Before he had keys to a red 1972 Lancia Fulvia HF, a bronze 1981 Porsche 911 Turbo, and a blue 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback 289, a young Sartori used to tool around this same terrain on his bicycle, in the shadow of the Zegna wool mill. The aptly named Sartori was born in Trivero, a stone’s throw from Zegna HQ, to a mother who had an immeasurable influence on his future vocation: She was a dressmaker, and he would often accompany her on Saturday outings to purchase fabrics. “When I was 7, 8, 9, I remember cycling around those villages and passing in front of the Villa Zegna and the wool mill,” he says. “And from the gate of the Casa Zegna, it was possible to see inside the place and some of the beauty. That got me dreaming. But at that time I didn’t know it was Zegna. I just loved the place.” One can’t help but get the sense that his career was a bit preordained, particularly when taking into account how textiles are woven into Zegna’s D.N.A.
Unlike most fashion houses (Loro Piana being a notable exception), Zegna operates five dedicated state-of-the-art mills. Its origins, in fact, lie in textile manufacturing, and that expertise in raw materials remains at the heart of all the brand’s enterprises. Sartori meets weekly with his team to discuss the latest technologies and determine which fabrics are required for which garments, whether it’s an airy silk-linen blend or a proprietary waffle cloth that combines 50 percent recycled paper gathered from magazines and newspapers with 50 percent cotton. And then there are the ultralight leathers. One particularly innovative look from spring-summer 2026 is a brown and cream plaid jacket that visually reads as a cashmere-linen blend but is in fact knitted from thin strips of leather.
Such lightness of materials was well suited to Dubai, where Zegna presented the collection in June, leaving a gaping hole in the Milan Fashion Week schedule (the brand typically closes out the event). The show wasn’t a mere replay of designs previously introduced in Europe, a common publicity move for brands, but a full-scale unveiling that saw the entire Zegna team decamp for several weeks to one of its major markets. “The collection went straight from the atelier to Dubai without any editing,” says Sartori. “The full team, 51 people, 17 of them tailors.”
Even when not on the road, Sartori understands the importance of creating an immersive experience, often allowing guests time to walk around the sets and to see and feel the clothes postshow. “The Zegna runway shows have grown over the years in their scale, scope, and spectacle, with truly awe-inducing, cinematic treatments executed to jaw-dropping effect,” says Bruce Pask, senior director of men’s fashion at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. “There is always a vital, fundamental idea at the center of each visual concept that absolutely underscores and amplifies the core message and meaning of the collection.” Past shows have featured mountains of cashmere fibres and linen-clad models weaving through stalks of flax. The Dubai event was no exception. Zegna transformed the city’s opera house into a desert oasis complete with sand dunes, local flora, and a sun-bleached palette that echoed the clothing, which had an intentionally lived-in feel. Sartori went heavy on layering and monochromatic pairings (think sets over suits). He also threw out the rule book on seasonality.
“The clash between seasons is part of [the vision], the idea of accumulating, of layering, and of stratification,” says Sartori, attributing his approach to his habit of working on more than one collection at a time rather than making an abrupt shift every six months.
The collection’s technical achievement lay in Sartori’s innovative take on summer suiting, for which he developed extraordinarily lightweight linen garments through advanced construction methods that eliminated traditional linings while maintaining structural integrity. Slipper-thin loafers and bare feet kept things light, and even his signature banded-collar Il Conte jacket was made ever so slightly oversize, creating a more relaxed appearance. Eventually, the desert neutrals gave way to buttercream, chartreuse, oxblood, burnt orange, and lavender, while tunics and shorts were paired with tailoring. Sartori, the self-professed man in black, took his bow in a relatively pale, grey ensemble for a change alongside singer-songwriter James Blake, who provided the music.
Despite the spectacular destination shows, for Sartori and Zegna, all roads lead back to the Biellese Alps—specifically, a 100-square-kilometre reforestation project and nature preserve known as Oasi Zegna, which Ermenegildo Zegna had the foresight to set aside for conservation in the 1930s, and which today remains a touchstone for the brand. Over the past nine decades, the company has planted more than 500,000 trees, sowing the seeds for the sustainable ethos that guides all things Zegna. That means traceability, from crop to garment (with full journey details for its Oasi cashmere accessible via Q.R. code hangtags), reliance on 100 percent renewable energy in the U.S. and Europe, and an enduring awareness that a great wardrobe, like a forest, is built over time, not in one fell swoop. “We are designing for a man that is collecting. We’re giving values to the garments, blending season after season, as a normal man does with his own wardrobe and products,” says Sartori. “We want to create a collection that is timeless in the quality, in the design, and in the aesthetic.”
The Zegna customer chooses his acquisitions with care, and the same can be said of Sartori and his collaborators, many of whom have been in his circle for a decade or more. Julie Ragolia, who has styled the shows and a variety of the brand’s campaigns for several years, met Sartori in 2014. “I think we had seen what each other was doing and felt a certain like-mindedness, and I remember having had the most incredible conversation about art, fashion, and culture,” she says. Not long after, Sartori invited her to style the Berluti shows in Paris, and when he returned to Zegna, he asked her to follow. This fall will mark 10 years that the two have worked together.
With a far less dictatorial approach than many of his peers, Sartori is more interested in how Zegna’s customers live and interact with their purchases, whether they are cool 20-somethings in Tokyo or chic septuagenarians in Toronto. I witnessed this approach firsthand in Shanghai when actor Mads Mikkelsen, then 58, alongside Gen Z actor Leo Wu, managed to move nearly $15 million worth of Zegna merchandise in a single hour, all via WeChat live stream. Sartori also takes a global perspective, picking up references from all corners. “I watch everything, and I see everything, but I don’t design for one specific place in the world,” he says. For him, it is more a matter of style, values, and supporting a customer who is conscious about what they are buying, how it is made, and how it will fit into not only their lifestyle but also their existing wardrobe. Evolution and a certain continuity are key—chasing trends is not.
That regard for agelessness and placelessness is also reflected in the casting for shows and ad campaigns. In addition to a span of generations and ethnicities, it’s not uncommon to spot a few women in the mix—though Sartori has no plans to do women’s suiting anytime soon. “No, no, no, it is not a sign of things to come,” he says. “I love to design for men, but I think that women can easily borrow garments from the boyfriend, the partner, the father, the husband. Because those pieces are also good for women with the right dose, so maybe one jacket, a beautiful piece of knitwear. And I like offering a vision of [that] woman. I think it’s very interesting.” Mikkelsen has been a brand fixture for several years, having walked in shows and fronted campaigns, the most recent being spring-summer 2025. But it was the choice of 60-something entrepreneur and famed watch collector Auro Montanari (a.k.a. John Goldberger to legions of horology aficionados who follow him online) that caught the attention of the Financial Times and had social media buzzing. When Zegna approached him about a shoot, Sartori recalls, “He said, ‘Ale, I’m not a model, I’m a doer.’ ” Montanari also made the journey to Dubai, thrilling 40 watch collectors, both locals and V.I.P.s flown in from around the world, who were treated to a talk by the expert.
“Alessandro is an incredibly gifted, experimental, and intuitive designer,” says Saks and Neiman’s Pask, noting Sartori’s rare combination of creativity and pragmatism: His timely embrace of sportswear led the century-old institution to evolve beyond its more traditional sartorial history. While profits for the Zegna Group, which also includes Thom Browne and Tom Ford, slid slightly in 2024, the Zegna brand’s revenues have grown steadily, reaching about $3.3 billion last year. The annual earnings report makes for interesting reading during a time when both LVMH and Kering have taken significant hits while brands such as Brunello Cucinelli—which also places a priority on sourcing, ethical production, and transparency—have seen sales rise. Whether the customer was already in search of sustainable options is almost inconsequential, as Sartori and company, never far from their roots, have made a priority of amplifying the values of Ermenegildo Zegna.
Still, Sartori must sell a dream, albeit a wearable one, and he continues to explore that realm between the classic and the avant-garde, to the delight of modern men—and a few women—of style and substance. Ragolia recalls a recent encounter at a gallery opening in New York, for which she donned Zegna. “I was standing near a friend who was talking to one of the artists, who kept staring at me,” she says. Eventually, the artist approached, touched Ragolia’s sleeve, and asked, wide-eyed, who had made her jacket. “When I told him it was Zegna, he continued to marvel over the fabric, the weft and weave, the colour. In a crowded gallery, where his works lined the walls, this artist was talking about Zegna.”
Sartori may be creating a new benchmark for what a large luxury brand can be, but he references the advice to “buy what you like,” now a standard line whether you’re in the market for an artwork or a pair of trousers. “It seems simple, but it isn’t,” he says. “Customers in fashion have been around dictates too long. Now it’s time to go personal, to feel yourself, to build your wardrobe from listening and watching but in the end make your own decisions, because fashion and garments only really have a meaning when they are your garments, designed to make yourself better. I don’t want you to be somebody else.”
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Hugo Michell Gallery
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hugomichellgallery.com
Cassandra Bird Gallery
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D’lan Contemporary
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At 193 cm, Källenius might tower over most of them physically, but there’s nothing in his demeanor that hints at the disparity in their corporate statuses. Nor is this the kind of place you’d expect to find the head of one of the world’s great luxury brands: a man paid roughly $22 million last year to lead the 166,000 employees of a company valued at around $75 billion, whose founder, Carl Benz, invented the motor car and whose genuinely iconic logo has graced the nose of everything from popemobiles and Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 racer to the most expensive automobile ever sold at auction. In a recent report, investment analysts Bernstein described Mercedes-Benz under Källenius’s reign as a “four-wheeled cash-generation machine”.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
But the celebrated car marques are not like luxury brands that make watches or couture or accessories or Champagne. Look beyond the alluring badge and bodywork for a moment: the objects Mercedes-Benz and its rivals produce are insanely complex, ever-changing and hugely capital-intensive—and must succeed in an utterly cutthroat market. Their impact on the environment and the economy has always made them perennial hot-button issues politically. But the electrification of the automobile has put these companies in the geopolitical crosshairs like never before, as governments swap tariffs and risk a global trade war to ensure that they keep their respective shares of the car industry, even as it undergoes an unprecedented transformation.
And of course, the cars need to be remade, too. Add the impact of electrification to Källenius’s own manifesto for Mercedes-Benz, and this storied marque is likely to change more in the next decade than it did in the previous 138 years. “It’s a once-in-a-century transformation,” he says. “We are reinventing our original invention.”
So who is the guy steering Mercedes through this tumult? What’s his plan? And what cars will he give us? Källenius has sat for plenty of interviews in his five years as CEO (his second five-year term is set to conclude in 2029), but this is the first time that he has offered anything more. Robb Report was invited to spend the weekend with him in Arjeplog, the tiny northern-Swedish town whose population swells fourfold each winter as the global car industry descends to test its secret new models on the area’s frozen lakes. Spy photographers abound, but to reduce the chance of its future lineup being scooped, Mercedes rents its own private expanse of sheet ice from a local landowner. I watch Källenius as he test-drives the electric G at his empire’s oddest and most northerly outpost, meets local staff and records social-media footage. He drives some other, more secret new electric AMGs that I am definitely not allowed to see, whose debuts are much further off and which, when not on the ice, remain hidden beneath their heavy covers outside the workshop.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
Källenius has a reputation for being fearsomely intelligent, rational and efficient, but also not the type of hyper-alpha asshole who too often comes to lead a carmaker. Over the weekend, I see that sharpness not just in the logic of his answers, but in the nuance of the English prose, as perfect as his German, in which he delivers them.
I’m not sure I’d want those piercing blue eyes and that high-wattage intellect turned on me in a meeting if I didn’t have my numbers straight, but his non-asshole character dominates. It comes through in the easy egalitarianism he displays with the engineers in the workshop, or how he notices and thanks waitstaff, or the way he’s enjoying a casual dinner and a beer with a long table of employees of all stripes when I first arrive at the unglamorous Silverhatten hotel where he’s staying—a glorified bunkhouse for the United Nations of engineers and test-drivers who flock here. This is clearly a leader who sees the obligations of his office as clearly as its privileges: an attitude underpinned by a natural Nordic modesty and reserve.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“I guess your personality is something that forms in younger years, and I’m not sure you can fundamentally change it,” he tells me over coffee one morning. “There is a Swedish core in the way I act, and maybe most Swedes are not kick-the-door-down types. I believe this should be true for anybody who is at Mercedes or has the privilege to lead Mercedes: We are custodians of that star for a brief moment. It’s my job to hand it over safe and in better condition. The person is not the brand.”
Perhaps not, but the brand will look very different by the time this person is done with it in 2029. And you can add loyalty to that list of his qualities: Källenius has never worked anywhere else, having joined Mercedes-Benz in 1993 straight out of the Stockholm School of Economics, where he founded an American football team called the Traders, for which he was captain of the offense. True to form, he studied tapes of the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots in order to write the team playbooks. At Mercedes, he was a finance guy at first; an early posting took him to Alabama, to help set up the Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa, where he became—and remains—a Crimson Tide fan.
In 2003, at the age of just 34, he was put in charge of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren supercar project; two years later, he was given control of Mercedes-Benz High Performance Powertrains, the firm’s in-house Formula 1 engine-maker. After a year as vice president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International back in Tuscaloosa, he was recalled to Germany in 2010 to become vice president and managing director of AMG, Mercedes’s high-performance road-car division. Then came two board positions to prove his breadth of ability—sales and marketing, followed by research and development—before he ascended to the top job in 2019 at the age of 50.
The electric G-Class we’re about to drive together (now officially if awkwardly named the “G580 with EQ Technology”) is a neat encapsulation of many of the things Källenius has tried to do at Mercedes. First, it’s an EV, which fits his initial plan to make everything electric—“where market conditions allow”—by 2030. Second, it’s expensive, with a starting price in the US of $161,500 (around $257,000, though likely to cost more in Australia). Another critical if controversial part of his manifesto is to shift Mercedes upmarket; he spun off the truck business early and is currently in the process of dropping high-volume, low-margin models including the A- and B-Classes. And lastly, he wants new models to still feel like Mercedes vehicles, even if the design that underpins them is radically different from what came before. And the G-Wagen—with its gloriously anachronistic overengineering that you can feel and hear every time you clunk a door shut—epitomises the Mercedes ethos whether the vehicle is gas or electric.
Other new Mercedes EVs go much further in their innovation, gaining greater advantage from their electric drivetrains given that they were designed as EVs from the outset. They use Mercedes’s new MB.OS operating system with built-in AI and receive fresh design cues inside and out—not least the mad, vast, almost full-width hyperscreen user interface—rather than the same upright, rectilinear lines first sketched out to suit the needs of farmers and soldiers when the G-Class was introduced 45 years ago.
But as shorthand for old Merc meeting new, the electric G is perfect, and it’s pleasing to be driven in it by the CEO on whose watch it was conceived and executed. “Yes, this is an electric G,” he says as he drifts it across the glassy frozen lake, “but it’s 100 percent G. The most important box for any G-Class to tick is the Schöckl mountain in Austria, to earn that Schöckl-proven plaque they all have. I did five trips up and down it in the electric G in the autumn, and not only can it do the Schöckl, I felt it could do the Schöckl best of all.”
His stints at AMG, in Formula 1, and with McLaren have turned this “spreadsheet guy” into a skilled driver, though most Swedes seem to have the ability to safely slide a car on ice coded into their DNA. Even with the G sideways at around 110 km/h, a plume of snow and ice billowing high behind it, Källenius has enough spare mental-processing capacity to adjust the screen settings while telling a funny story about the very first time an electric G even crossed his mind.
He was at the Detroit Auto Show in 2018, when the company was first showing the revised G-Class. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to the unveiling and asked Källenius’s predecessor, Dieter Zetsche, if an electric version was in the cards. “Dr. Zetsche said, ‘Yes, of course,’ Källenius recalls. “I was head of R & D at the time, and one of my colleagues turned to me and said, ‘Do we even have an electric G in the plan?’ I said that I guessed we did now.”
Those less keen on electric cars than Arnie and Ola might be pleased by the fact that the ambition to be battery-only by 2030 has fizzled fast. Mercedes now predicts that EVs and plug-in hybrids will account for only half of its sales by the late 2020s, and the company is refreshing its range of gas engines to keep them relevant and selling deep into the 2030s. This is a systemic issue and no reflection on Mercedes products; Källenius has always averred “where market conditions allow”, and market conditions currently don’t. But the retreat is still slightly awkward.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“The early adopter phase is over,” he tells me. “Now we need to convince every customer. I think it would be a mistake to say, ‘Okay, electric is growing a bit slower, let’s sit back, wait, and not do anything.’ Because if you put product into the market that is so convincing that most customers go, ‘Yeah, maybe I didn’t have iPhone 1, but iPhone 4 looks pretty good,’ you can get very quick, even exponential growth. And if you were the one that said, ‘I’m not going to set sail here; let’s wait and see what the weather does,’ all the other boats would be out on the ocean, and you’d miss the race.”
But if buyers are going to be sold on EVs by the technology rather than by brand power, what does Mercedes’ 138 years of history count for? With customers attracted to new EV marques that are able to innovate unconstrained by precedent—and one of those brands having a market cap 7.5 times that of Mercedes, despite selling a few hundred thousand fewer cars per year—does heritage become a liability rather than an asset?
“We also do unconventional things,” Källenius insists. “With blow-your-mind–type features like the crazy hyperscreen in the EQS and the EQE, a lot of people are looking at Mercedes who perhaps didn’t look before. We are one of the biggest automotive sponsors in e-sports. Formula 1 is off the charts; 53 percent of F1 fans are between 15 and 35, and 37 percent are women. When we do crazy things like the G-Class collaborations with Moncler or the late Virgil Abloh, you go beyond the traditional auto crowd to one that buys from other luxury brands. My test is if one of my kids sends me a picture and goes, like, ‘Dad, what is this?’ I got their attention.”
I wonder how the former finance guy now handles running one of the world’s great luxury brands and to whom he looks for inspiration. He acknowledges that he meets with Bernard Arnault at LVMH and Jean- Frédéric Dufour at Rolex but is coy about the nature of their discussions.
“We also reach out to people in other luxury businesses to understand how they think,” Källenius notes. “I had the good fortune to meet Brunello Cucinelli, and he invited me down to Solomeo, the hamlet which he has helped to restore. It’s one of the most beautiful villages I’ve ever seen. I learned a lot about fabrics, quality, stealth luxury, sometimes not emphasising the brand so much. A fine gentleman like that has a very clear understanding of what luxury means in his business. We brought some secret new-vehicle designs to show him and to get his input.”
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“Maybe you can’t compare a high-intensity, high-engineering, high-capital-investment good like a car to a piece of clothing,” he adds. “They are different businesses. But good chefs eat in each other’s restaurants even though they have a totally different style of cooking, just to see what the others are doing. But when you go back into your kitchen, you’re still the chef, and you put together the recipe.”
I sense a slight frustration from the hyperrational Swede—perhaps that he believes he has gotten the recipe right but has to wait a bit longer for diners’ tastes to catch up. In many cases, judged on any objective criteria, the new Mercedes EVs will be the best cars the company has ever made, including the electric G. The customers, though, are as busy trying to get their heads around this brave new world as the automotive CEOs are.
“This is definitely the most transformative decade since the inception of the company,” Källenius agrees. “But we’ve always done this. The Swabian engineers who founded Mercedes didn’t look at the horseshoe and think, ‘How do we make this lighter to make the horse run faster?’ They wanted to get the horse out of the equation and do something new. That attitude hasn’t changed. We’ve always looked through the windscreen, not in the mirror.”
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Men at Play
Two restless entrepreneurs build a Belizean island paradise especially for those “aha! moments”.
Though he’s supposed to be in what he calls his “play years” now, Knoxville-based real-estate entrepreneur Steve Hall still finds himself working on vacation. After a trip to Belize, he got the itch to build something new and started meeting with developers. Hall hit it off with David Keener, CEO and owner of Vision Properties, and together they acquired an isolated tract on Placencia Caye, a private island just five minutes by boat from the mainland.
After two and a half years of work, they’ve recently started welcoming guests to Prana Maya, a secluded, wellness-focused retreat that enjoys expansive views of the Caribbean Sea, the island’s lagoon and the Maya Mountains. “We designed everything to inspire people,” Hall says of the property. “Every aspect of the resort is intentional. Every service we offer is designed to create that ‘aha! moment’ that will rock someone’s world.”
The property includes seven three- and four-bedroom villas featuring locally carved wooden doors. The breezy, secluded structures are sited to prioritise views of the water, and each has its own plunge pool. Rooms at the Inn—a collection of 10 airy, light-filled suites—face the ocean. Each guest has an assigned butler, and every bed at the resort is fitted with a custom grounding mat, designed to replicate a connection with nature; some studies suggest they promote mental and physical well-being.
Belize’s tropical landscape is the catalyst for getting outdoors. Its unique saltwater flats give sport-fishing aficionados a bucket-list opportunity: catching what the International Game Fishing Association calls the Grand Slam—permit, tarpon and bonefish—all in one day. So Hall and Keener recruited High Adventure Company, a global outfitter with 30 years of guiding expertise, to take guests on exclusive angling excursions. The resort will also offer cave-tubing, jungle-trekking, zip-lining and diving trips.
Courtesy of Prana Maya
If you’re in search of less rugged activities, head to the spa and wellness centre. The design team placed it on prime real estate: the Inn’s top floor, which has 360-degree water views and 5 m ceilings. Here, you’ll find a yoga studio, five private treatment rooms and a sound-therapy space. You can also enjoy Prana Maya’s private beach, the only sandy stretch on the island that isn’t shared with another property.
At The Grill, the open-air restaurant, executive chef Liesel Kirste cooks with indigenous ingredients—many sourced from the resort’s four-hectare farm. The menu includes elevated fare such as locally caught lobster, grilled and served over fresh pasta. Even components of more casual dishes are made from scratch: at the Island Club—with its outdoor kitchen, lawn games and forthcoming palapa-shaded pickleball court—the ketchup and mayonnaise are made in-house. That gives the culinary team the flexibility to design a bespoke menu, upon request, to suit your nutritional needs.
Ultimately, Prana Maya is the expression of a million small details (down to the reef-safe spa products, curated by a Belizean supplier) and the location’s natural majesty. “When you get out to the island site, see the spectacular views of the Caribbean, turn another direction and see the beauty of the Maya Mountains, it is such an awesome and almost overwhelming feeling,” Hall says. One he is determined to share with everyone who visits.
Top image: Benedict Kim/Courtesy of Prana Maya
