Walker unveils his Kokomo Fiji Resort
It’s reassuring to hear even rich listers bargain when staying at luxury resorts. Curious about the endless buzz around Fiji’s ultraexclusive Laucala Island Resort, Lang Walker – Australia’s 17th-richest man, with an estimated personal wealth of AU$2.02 billion – dropped by in 2015 to see if the hype was justified.
Laucala, opened in 2008 by Austrian billionaire and Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz, had long been popular with the fashionable set, who like both its privacy and its private runway.
Elle Macpherson even flew her entourage in to get married there.
Arriving by chopper with wife Sue, Walker paid the then asking rate of about AU$4000 for night one.
But when Sue wanted to stay on, the founder and executive chairman of Walker Corporation, Australia’s largest privately owned, diversified property development company, put his hard hat on.
“I bargained them down to $2000 for another night.” In fact he had an ulterior motive. He was checking out the competition.
Four years earlier, Walker had bought his own Fijian island, Yaukuve, and was in the process of building a luxury resort on it.
In so doing he joins an informal club of billionaires with serious stakes in the South Pacific archipelago.
Said club includes Dutch businessman and investor Alex van Heeren, who owns Dolphin Island, and David Gilmour, a Canadian gold mine owner who in the 1990s built Wakaya Club & Spa and its pin-up villa Vale O, or the “house in the clouds”.
Gilmour’s guest book is a who’s who of global rich listers, those signing in over the years including Bill and Melinda Gates, the late Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, George Lucas, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise – then Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.
Gilmour still spends up to four months of the year in Fiji.
These billionaires might have put their mark on paradise before Walker.
And he might have bigger fish to fry this year, in the form of projects such as finishing a AU$2.5 billion multi-tower Collins Square development in Melbourne and starting a AU$2 billion redevelopment of Parramatta’s city centre.
But Kokomo, the resort he’s built in Fiji, is closer to the 71-year-old’s heart than any of that.
On April 1, he’ll welcome his first paying guests to Kokomo, the first development into which he’s injected not just his own money – AU$100 million and counting – but much of himself.
And the first hotel he’s both built and managed.
On graduating from Jannali High School, Walker started studying accountancy by correspondence but soon quit to join his father’s business.
“The one thing I took away from my piano lessons was a Japanese or Asian serenade my mother made me play,” he says.
“Through that I came across the name Kokomo, which I think was a pseudonym used by the composer.I loved the word immediately; I thought it was the best word I’d ever heard of; so happy.” The Vaucluse Junior sailing dinghy he raced as a boy in the late 1950s and early ’60s was the first Kokomo, his two superyachts more recent owners of the moniker. “And so it was the obvious name for this island, too.”
As he holds court by the water’s edge, Walker is clearly part of the furniture, the staff not batting an eyelid at his presence on the island. Joining him and Sue for this cosy dinner is daughter-in-law Camille, who is married to middle son Chad and, as a former public relations consultant with French cosmetics brand Lancôme, handling the media for Kokomo. Long-time artist to the family, Chris Kenyon, a former architect who designed the sets for the first two Mad Max films in the 1970s, completes the party. Like
the many personal staff and helpers clustered around the Walkers, Kenyon has known them for decades. He’s been the artist-in-residence at Kokomo for the past six months, painting more than 200 canvases, including a 6.9 x 2 metre work, for the villa walls and public areas.
It’s a strange, almost eerie feeling, seeing a resort just before it opens. The builders are in overdrive towards the back of the resort, hammering and drilling around the clock.
Front of house everything sparkles yet it somehow feels flat, as if we’re the forward party and the excitement is yet to explode. As with the build-up to Christmas, you envy those who will get to unwrap this place.
That said, the overall impression is of a place breathtaking enough to rival Marlon Brando’s Tahiti island Tetiaroa atoll, home to the no-expense-spared hotel, The Brando, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Limited Edition portfolio, which includes the 30-hectare Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands, where Branson hosted Barack and Michelle Obama immediately post-presidency. “With the white sand and crystal water, it’s so pretty it’s cartoonish, isn’t it?” Kenyon whispers between bites of entrée, a just-caught tuna now swimming in a cordon bleu sauce.
Indeed, one half expects to catch Pebbles and Bam Bam hiding behind a palm tree.