Architect of Wow
Architect and real estate investor Fernando Malenchini (MBA’00) turns unexpected ideas into magical buildings
It’s a hard life, lounging in a private plunge pool with a glass of local red wine, the sun shimmering over vineyards to the tops of the Andes. Set in its own 55-acre vineyard, the 18-room Cavas Wine Lodge is one of the ultimate luxury vacation spots in Argentina’s premier wine country; one English newspaper called it “Alice’s wine-soaked wonderland; a true Narnia for grownups.” In high season, rooms start at $700 a night. But, before Fernando Malenchini (MBA’00) came along, there was no boutique lodge, just a crumbling vineyard. Malenchini is an architect and a real estate investor with a talent for spotting gaps in the market. It’s a skill he’s since turned to wedding venues and office spaces. He talks to Everett about being first to an idea and the design principles he applies to transform every building—even financial company offices—into places that feel like home (or that you wish were).
Some entrepreneurs go where the action is. Architect and real estate investor Fernando Malenchini has a persistent habit of finding places where exciting action should be—and then creating new destinations that draw profitable clientele.
Head, for example, to the foothills of the Andes, in Malenchini’s native Argentina. There, in the high-altitude wine country of the Mendoza region, Malenchini and his team saw an opportunity in 2002 to create something new: a luxury resort catering to tourists visiting nearby vineyards.
Malenchini, cofounder of Buenos Aires–based Pondal Malenchini Landplanning & Architecture, acknowledges that when he and his partners bought a neglected 55-acre vineyard with the intent to construct a new hotel, he knew little about the hospitality business. But he saw an opportunity in the country’s growing wine industry—its exports jumped by 800 percent between 1998 and 2003. He proceeded to build a business case based on lessons gained from visiting more than 10 successful game lodges in Africa, which, like his Argentina winelands site, were located in isolated areas. A post-Apartheid rise in new game lodges also provided a chance to evaluate varied architectural designs. “The wine region in Argentina was booming and we saw that there was a big niche market opportunity, so we went for it,” Malenchini says.
“I applied what they have accomplished in the savanna to the winelands.”
What he learned in Africa was the importance of creating a destination that caters to travelers’ dreams. Translated to the winelands, that meant the smell of vines outside a guest’s door. The views of the Andes in the distance. “If I’m traveling 13 hours by flight from Europe, or 10 hours from New York, I arrive to a beautiful estancia [residence] with an amazing decor. So, I fulfill all of those dreams,” he says.
Cavas Wine Lodge opened in 2005—shortly after the Academy Award–winning film Sideways, set in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, elevated interest in wine tourism. Malenchini says it has developed symbiotic relationships with neighboring wineries, offering a complementary set of services and guiding guests to nearby vineyard tours. “They send us all their clients, and we send all our clients who come to the hotel to visit their wineries and tours. We are strategic partners,” he says.
In 2017, readers at Travel & Leisure magazine named the 18-room lodge the best resort in South America, praising its farm-to-table restaurant and private pools.
The project’s success strengthened Malenchini’s belief in his entrepreneurial abilities, skills he’d honed at BU. After earning an undergraduate architectural degree at the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires in 1994, Malenchini decided to study entrepreneurship at Questrom because the school’s students came from a wide range of fields. “I am an architect and I didn’t want to be surrounded only by engineers and lawyers,” he says. “I wanted a big mix of careers and a bigger spectrum of life.”
He says doing well in the program—and studying in English (his third language after Spanish and Italian)—bolstered his confidence and made him feel ready for any challenge after graduation.
That challenge confronted him immediately, but not as Malenchini expected. He had planned to spend a couple of years working in business before returning home. But after graduation, he’d rushed back to Buenos Aires and his family’s energy company after learning his father had developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the neurodegenerative disease. Malenchini and his two younger brothers were forced to take over the firm. He says that without his MBA training, the work would have been much more difficult. “I never expected I would do it just after graduation. I did my best, and thank God I could manage it with my brothers,” he says. The brothers sold the business in 2011. During this period, Malenchini started his architectural firm with a friend, Diego González Pondal; he also set up a separate business to work on real estate investments.
The Cavas Wine Lodge was Pondal Malenchini’s first major project, and Malenchini says it provided a template for what followed: initial ambivalence from the wider industry for their ideas, followed by a rush to jump on the newly discovered bandwagon. His team’s business plan for the lodge received skeptical reviews, he says, in part because no one in Argentina had ever heard of a wine lodge. (He funded the project through loans from friends and family.) But he pressed on because he saw a chance to bring a new kind of business, luxury accommodations, to wine country. He believed in the wine lodge concept and the research supporting it.
“It’s not only intuition,” he says. “I test everything with a very good business plan and I always have exit strategies. I actually learned this from BU; it was always very important to have an exit strategy. So, I always also plan for the worst-case scenario. In the end, the hotel is a vineyard, and I could sell it, I could make wine.”
Other projects since the opening of Cavas Wine Lodge have allowed Malenchini to advance new ideas by following a similar text. Study the marketplace. Look for gaps. Identify existing players, what they do well and don’t do well. And most important, listen to prospective customers.
In 2013, his team opened Astilleros Milberg, an events venue on the outskirts of Buenos Aires for weddings, corporate parties, bar mitzvahs, and other celebrations. How can you differentiate an events venue? “Most of the venues in Buenos Aires have no green and no outdoors, and the people value a lot being in nature,” Malenchini says. “So that was one of the big things that we did and that’s why we took the market.”
Astilleros Milberg boasts two buildings surrounded by greenery, a waterfront deck, and lounge areas that wouldn’t look out of place in a Club Med brochure. Its growth since opening has won the attention of a buyer, and Malenchini says he’s working through the due diligence process to complete a sale of the business.
Building customer experiences is central to Malenchini’s work. As an architect and investor, his approach is to envision the people who will spend time in and around the spaces he designs. What they feel in the space. What they do, taste, smell. How the building fits in within the surrounding natural environment. All of these concerns matter, whether people are relaxing on vacation in the mountains, celebrating a country wedding, or working in a big downtown corporate office. It’s why he thinks about cubic feet as much as square feet.
“Everything has to be in proportion,” Malenchini says. “People value maybe having two stories or a loft-style apartment, or a loft-style office because you feel you are in a space that is more involving, like it’s taking care of you. You are not just in a sandwich between a floor and a roof so that you feel compressed.”
To Malenchini, designing work spaces means confronting the same human-level challenges as developing a luxury environment for tourists. Comfort is paramount, or what he refers to as a sense of belonging. The design should foster a community feeling. “We want to make the spaces friendly enough that the people would like to stay rather than go home,” he says. The office is not only a place to work, but also a place to meet fellow employees, and to seek enjoyment through amenities such as a gym, a restaurant, gardens, and lounge spaces.
Pondal Malenchini deployed these concepts in its designs for the Buenos Aires regional headquarters for QBE, a large Australian insurance firm. QBE came with a request: create offices that will help us retain millennial and younger workers, who tend not to stay in one job for very long. The building includes open floor plans, kitchen and café areas, a ground-floor restaurant for employees, outdoor gardens, a gym and running course, a gaming playroom, and relaxation areas. Some spaces have imitation grass flooring. After a first office building made a positive difference in the company’s culture, QBE hired Malenchini’s firm to design a second.
Malenchini says he seeks to use design to appeal to people’s emotions and memories. And kitchens and gardens are great office environment tools. People relate to a kitchen space, for example, that reminds them of their grandmother’s home.
“Of course, many office buildings, when we tell them that it has to have a kitchen that relates to the past, they look at us like we are crazy,” Malenchini says. “If I build a kitchen that relates to their home, that relates to the culture, relates to the past, people feel that they belong to that place, that office, that community. People don’t realize it, but they feel comfortable when they are there. So, they say, ‘I don’t know why, but I love this company.’ And they don’t realize that maybe they love it because they can go to the gardens and they have an amazing kitchen and they can all talk and have lunch there.”
It’s a familiar pattern. People may look at Malenchini as if he’s crazy when he first has an idea, but once he brings his designs to life, they’re soon smitten.
