WATG and Wimberly Interiors in the Global Press: July 2026

Leadership and legacy ran through July’s coverage of WATG and Wimberly Interiors. New regional leadership for Asia Pacific led the month, alongside editorial features on the design philosophy behind projects in Greece, the Philippines, and Colombia, a new Wimberly Interiors suite in New York, and a residential proposal in Salt Lake City. Beyond projects, coverage included a profile of Wimberly Interiors’ new F&B studio, a look at WATG’s use of AI in casino design, dual coverage of the strategic thinking behind Ras El Hekma, and a spot on Robb Report’s 50 Best Luxury Hotels list.

Hospitality Net and Hotel Designs both reported on the appointment, framing Bhavya’s mandate around strengthening WATG’s integrated regional approach and embedding sustainability, ecology, and resilience into the firm’s built-environment work.

David Moore, CEO of WATG, was quoted on the significance of the hire:

“Bhavya brings a rare combination of strategic planning, sustainability, infrastructure and digital transformation expertise to WATG. Her experience aligns directly with the opportunities we see across Asia Pacific, where clients are seeking destinations and developments that are commercially resilient, environmentally responsible and deeply connected to local culture.”

Travel and Tour World positioned the appointment as reinforcing WATG’s long-term commitment to sustainable development across one of the world’s fastest-growing hospitality regions, while The Edge Singapore and Yahoo Finance Singapore carried the news into the region’s business press. Travel Daily Media and eGlobal Travel Media reported the appointment for Australia’s travel trade readership, and the news closed out the month in LODGING Magazine’s industry-wide Comings & Goings column.

Wellness + Design Collection ran a feature dedicated to WATG’s renovation of Lagen Island Resort, framing preservation as the design strategy behind the project: the original narra wood flooring was lifted and reset as wall paneling, and existing structures were retained to limit environmental disturbance.

Chiara Calufetti-Lim, Principal and Studio Director at WATG, who led the project, spoke to the emotional weight of the brief and Christine Chung, Associate Principal of WATG, added on the responsibility of renewing a long-established property in the region’s tourism market.

IDEAT Benelux included Lagen Island Resort in a roundup of ten standout hotel renovations, with its entry centered on WATG’s work at the property: the natural materials, local craftsmanship, and the more contemporary, sustainable aesthetic brought to the resort’s existing architecture.

SPACE Magazine gave Lagen Island Resort a dedicated feature in its July/August 2026 issue, positioning the 42-key resort as a benchmark for regenerative tourism in Southeast Asia. The piece detailed how WATG and Wimberly Interiors retained almost all of the resort’s existing structural framework to reduce demolition and construction waste, and how the design drew on Palawan’s woodworking and weaving traditions to embed local craftsmanship into the architecture itself rather than as decoration.

Spa Business reported that the resort’s transformation is now complete with the debut of Lagen Wellness Sanctuary, a new spa credited to WATG and Wimberly Interiors alongside the resort’s wider renovation, cutting the property’s room count from 51 to 42 keys and adding low-impact details like UV pool filtration and low-wattage lighting to protect the beach’s turtle nesting activity.

Wellness + Design Collection featured the newly opened Four Seasons Hotel Mykonos, where Wimberly Interiors led interior design across the guest rooms, spa, public areas, and kids club. The piece described the resort’s therapeutic intent, with the interiors bringing a sense of calm and restoration to the property’s gardens and courtyards overlooking Kalo Livadi Bay.

The Pappas Post also credited Wimberly Interiors with the hotel’s interior design in a wider piece on Mykonos’ current wave of luxury hotel openings, noting the property’s 94 rooms, suites, and villas above Kalo Livadi Bay as part of a broader look at the island’s growing roster of international hospitality brands.

Four Seasons Hotel & Residences Cartagena made the cover of Sleeper with a standalone feature tracing the hotel’s 15-year restoration. It is a strong recognition of WATG’s role as hotel designer on one of the most complex adaptive-reuse projects in the region. The project encompasses a 16th-century cloister, a 1920s social club, and a row of historic theaters into a single hotel. Wimberly Interiors was credited for the interiors across the property, including the Salón de Veracruz ballroom and the Umari Spa. Monica Cuervo, Managing Director, Americas, spoke to the challenge of unifying buildings that were never designed to work together:

Robb Report named the hotel on its list of the World’s 50 Best Luxury Hotels for 2026, the only Colombian property to make the ranking. Colombia One reported on the accomplishment, noting the judges’ praise for the property’s adaptive reuse of its historic buildings and crediting WATG and Wimberly Interiors among the firms behind its design.

SPACE Magazine also featured the project credited WATG and Wimberly Interiors in its July/August 2026 issue, as part of a wider feature on the firm’s work across Colombia and Egypt. Alongside Monica, Liana Hawes Young, Creative Directve at Wimberly Interiors, was quoted on the studio’s approach:

Building Salt Lake and The Salt Lake Tribune reported on a new WATG-designed proposal for Trolley House Residences, a 15-story, 97-condo tower pitched for a site near Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square. If approved, it would be one of the tallest buildings east of 700 East and one of the only for-sale condo developments in the area in recent memory. The design pairs a glass tower over a masonry podium, with brick and sandstone arches at street level nodding to the historic church previously on the site.

JW Marriott Essex House New York announced the debut of the Promenade Suite, the fourth addition to its Central Park Suite Collection, designed by Wimberly Interiors. Set on the hotel’s 38th floor with panoramic Central Park views, the 1,390-square-foot suite draws its palette of merlot, aubergine, and green from nearby Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera, balanced with softer tones pulled from the park itself, and layers furnishings and textured wallcoverings against the hotel’s Art Deco detailing.

Supper Magazine published “Test of Time”, a five-page feature on Wimberly Interiors’ newly launched dedicated F&B studio, led by by Creative Director Damien Follone. The piece traced how the studio, sitting alongside Wimberly Interiors’ wider design division after fifteen years in operation, pairs focused F&B expertise with full access to a project’s architecture and interiors from day one, rooted in Damien’s belief that memorable venues are built through sensory detail, not trends.

Damien walked through three recent projects that show the range of the studio’s approach:

• Paper Moon at Fairmont Taghazout Bay in Morocco.
• Spuntino  – an Italian aperitivo-led restaurant at Four Seasons Resort & Residences at The Pearl, Doha.
• A set of seven distinct F&B venues at Giza Palace Hotel & Spa in Cairo, including the Vietnamese restaurant Onu, the steakhouse Beefbar, and the Arola resturant.

Across all three, Damien framed F&B as central to how a hotel brand reaches guests:

Construction Business News ME put Rob Sykes, Associate Principal at WATG Advisory Services, on its July cover for “Reading the Coast,” a wide-ranging interview on the advisory strategy behind Ras El Hekma, Egypt’s North Coast destination. Rob walked through the discipline behind early-stage advisory work: guest profiling, demand validation, phasing logic, and operator alignment, all built to test a developer’s ambition against what a market can actually support.

The interview framed the North Coast’s central challenge as a market that has historically been domestic-dominated and highly seasonal, and the opportunity in Ras El Hekma as breaking that pattern to attract sustained international demand.

Looking further out, Rob described success at Ras El Hekma in ten to twenty years as full international recognition as a year-round luxury destination in its own right, built on three foundations: a phased masterplan, anchor institutions that define the destination’s character, and a clear strategy for extending demand beyond peak season through amenities, programming, and residential communities.

SPACE Magazine also covered the same project from a broader angle, reporting that WATG Advisory has been appointed to shape Ras El Hekma’s hotel strategy, including market research, feasibility studies, and branding guidance across the destination’s first phase of seven luxury hotels.

GGB Magazine, in the Casino Style special edition of its July 2026 issue, featured WATG in “Friction-Free Design”, a piece on how AI is reshaping the casino design process. Thomas Sykes, Principal Architect in Atlantic City, described how AI has broadened the range of possibilities the firm can explore earlier in a project, while stressing that every AI-assisted result still passes through the same review standards as any other deliverable, and that gaming design continues to depend on human judgement, cultural understanding, and hospitality expertise.

Sean Harry, who leads WATG’s global digital and data strategy, focused on what the technology changes in practice: it encompasses the distance between an idea and a client’s understanding of it, without changing who makes the design decisions.