On 23 April 2026, Azuma Farm Koiwai opened in Iwate Prefecture, in the north of Honshu — 24 villas on eight hectares carved out of a 130-year-old working dairy farm, designed by the Kyoto architect Shiro Miura and developed in partnership with East Japan Railway Company. The hotelier behind the project is Adrian Zecha, who is 92. He founded Aman in 1988.
The shape of Zecha's late career is, by now, a documented pattern. He sold control of Aman in 2014 after a long battle with the financier Omar Amanat; the group eventually consolidated under Vladislav Doronin, who has since taken it to a $3 billion valuation on the back of a PIF and Cain International capital raise (Skift, August 2022). Zecha, then in his eighties, launched Azerai in 2017 — a smaller, more accessible brand intended to do for Southeast Asia what Aman had done for the global trophy market.
Azerai, on the public record, is a more modest enterprise than the founding story suggested. The first property, in Luang Prabang, opened in 2017 and closed the following year; it has since been operated under another flag. Three Vietnamese properties remain — Azerai Can Tho (2018), Azerai La Residence in Hue, and Azerai Ke Ga Bay (2020). The brand has not produced the pipeline Zecha's name might have implied, and the Cambodian and Laotian footprints originally discussed have not materialised.
What is interesting is that this has not stopped him. The Koiwai project, under the Azumi Japan umbrella, is the third Zecha-associated brand to come out of his late period. Azumi Setoda opened in the Seto Inland Sea in 2021. The Iwate property is the first of what is positioned as the Azuma Farm sub-brand — a farm-life hospitality concept rooted in seasonal agriculture, horse-riding, and forest walks, with villas built from local cypress and red pine cut from the surrounding land. The room count, the materials, the partnership with a railway operator rather than a sovereign fund — every choice is the opposite of how Aman is now being scaled in Beverly Hills and Miami.
The reading for the industry is worth pausing on. The doctrine Zecha codified at Aman in the late 1980s — small key counts, regional materials, no logos, restraint as the product — has been productised, valued at three billion dollars, and is now being delivered in cities he would probably not have chosen. His own next move, at 92, is to go further away from the city, further away from the brand machine, and to do it with 24 keys on a dairy farm in Iwate.
That is a coherent late statement. The man who set the codes is reading the same market everyone else is reading — the saturation of urban trophy product, the appetite for slower and more local hospitality, the appetite for a hotel that does not feel like a hotel — and is answering it the way he answered Phuket in 1988. With one small property at a time, in a place no one was looking, with the railway company as the partner. Whether the industry follows him again is the question that makes the opening worth marking.
— Camille Vedy
