Lars Korschen: The accidental hotelier with a vision of paradise
1953-2014
LARS Korschen, who has died at the age of 60, owned the Peponi Hotel, a small but fashionable establishment on the exotic Indian Ocean island of Lamu just off the coast of Kenya, which had been founded by his Danish father, Aage, in 1967.
The Korschens — Aage and his German-born wife, Wera — had been farmers in the Aberdare Mountains. But when the political situation in Kenya became problematic in the mid1960s, Aage decided it was time for the family to return to Europe. On the voyage up the coast from Mombasa, however, he changed his mind. Instead of continuing to a continent where he had never lived, he decided that the family would settle on Lamu and preserve their African roots.
They bought a house, previously owned by a Nestlé heir, in the village of Shella, a few miles from Lamu town, and established the Peponi Inn (Peponi is Swahili for paradise), initially as a private guesthouse where friends of the family could come and relax, swim, fish and sail among the islands of the Lamu archipelago.
Menus were strict and uncompromising — Lars’s mother made little allowance for the difference in temperature between her farm in the highlands and the tropical coast. Even though transport on land was confined to donkeys and on sea to dhows, the hotel’s reputation spread by word of mouth and soon became well established.
In 1976, however, Aage died unexpectedly. Lars, by then a strikingly handsome and charming young man, was summoned back from London, where he had been studying at St Martin’s School of Art.
For the next few years, while Wera continued to run the hotel, Lars and his brother, Nils, set to work organising fishing safaris. When it became known that celebrities such as Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall had been seen on these safaris, Peponi became a favoured haunt of wealthy young people from Nairobi.
On one occasion, Yehudi Menuhin agreed to play for his fellow guests after dinner. When, at a poignant moment in a Bach partita, a violin string broke, Lars immediately replaced it with a piece of fishing tackle and the performance continued.
By the middle of the 1980s, Lars, who would probably never have chosen a career as a hotelier, found himself in charge of an establishment that was beginning to be spoken of as one of the great hotels of the world.
Life at Peponi was relaxed and unpretentious — “no news, no shoes”, as the actress Kim Cattrall put it.
Peponi’s reputation rested partly on privacy and discretion. On one occasion, hearing that a planeload of paparazzi was on its way to plague a well-known guest, Lars calmly redirected the visitors to another part of the coast, as inaccessible as it was inhospitable. They returned to Nairobi without pictures.
In recent years, when terrorist outrages — including kidnappings planned over the border in Somalia — were having a detrimental effect on Kenyan tourism, Lars’s calm organisation of the necessary security measures meant that the Shella community, both the hotel and the private houses that had by then become a significant part of village life, was relatively unaffected.
The result was that he was able to avoid laying off a single member of staff .
Lars was born on November 27 1953 on his family’s farm in the Aberdares and educated first in Nairobi and then in England, at Rossall, a co-educational school in Lancashire.
He took a degree at St Martin’s School of Art while sharing a flat in London with Ben Cross, the actor who would become known for his portrayal of the British Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire (1981).
Lars was loved and trusted by the local population of Lamu. Year after year at the island’s New Year dhow race, it was Lars who fired the starting gun and refereed the inevitable squabbles.
His funeral was attended by the entire village and much of the population of Lamu and Manda. One of the elders of the community said that of all the important decisions he had had to make, at least half were made only after discussion with Lars.
Lars, who had been suffering from emphysema, is survived by his wife, Carol, whom he married in 1990, and their two daughters. — Telegraph, London