When every luxury hotel promises authenticity, what does luxury actually mean? | PEAK Singapore

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For Upper House Hong Kong’s Simon McHendry, luxury now means human connection. The harder question is whether an expanding hotel brand can manufacture it without making it feel manufactured.

By [Zat Astha](https://www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg/authors/zat-astha) / 20 Sep 2026


[Business Leaders](https://www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg/tag/business-leaders), [Hospitality](https://www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg/tag/hospitality), [Luxury Hotels](https://www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg/tag/luxury-hotels)

Listen to enough hotels describe themselves and a strange sameness emerges: nobody wants to be formal or merely provide service anymore. Instead, they offer intuition, intimacy, connection, and community — repositioning guests as temporary locals, concierges as curators, and hotels as homes. Authenticity, once positioned as an antidote to corporate hospitality, has become one of its most reliable products.

Upper House Hong Kong occupies an interesting position within this contradiction because many of the ideas now endemic to luxury hospitality have long been central to its identity. General manager Simon McHendry speaks of genuine warmth, spontaneous encounters, individuality, and what the hotel calls “unscripted hospitality.” Its guiding ethos, “Houses Not Hotels,” is intended to make guests feel as though they are “returning home to friends”, though the modern difficulty is that almost everyone now wants to be your friend.

Over the past decade, luxury hotels have fled traditional iconography, as opulence can appear vulgar, formality feels antiquated, and conspicuous service reads as theatre. The more sophisticated proposition is increasingly to make enormous expenditure disappear behind apparent effortlessness.

This has produced one of contemporary hospitality’s stranger achievements: an industry devoting massive resources to making expensive experiences feel as though nobody tried very hard to create them.

Upper House explicitly positions itself against those older codes. “We deliberately move away from the formality of traditional luxury travel,” McHendry says. Every expansion, he adds, must retain “something more authentic, which is what makes us special.” “Travellers want more than a hotel stay,” he says. “They genuinely are looking to ‘live’ and ‘eat’ like a local.”

This sounds reasonable until one considers the peculiar transaction involved: a traveller flies into an unfamiliar city, enters an extremely expensive hotel, and pays an organisation to construct the illusion that the organisation is no longer mediating the city for them. Authenticity has become something you can book. Local restaurants are carefully selected, cultural encounters are programmed, and wellness experiences are assembled, until even spontaneity receives a calendar invitation.

Still, none of this necessarily makes the experience fraudulent, but it highlights a more interesting problem: the distinction between authenticity and its simulation has become increasingly difficult to locate.

Or perhaps that distinction no longer matters given that the physical markers of luxury have become surprisingly easy to reproduce. With enough capital, any competitor can hire an excellent architect, import exquisite stone, commission bespoke furniture, and install technology sophisticated enough to anticipate a guest’s preferences before breakfast. Beautiful hotels and restaurants are no longer particularly rare, and even excellent service exists far beyond the uppermost reaches of the market.