Georgette Culucundis Mallory – who oversees the spas for the Delamar hotels, including the Delamar Southport Spa, which had its official opening Thursday, Jan. 25 – views these spas as an extension of the hotels and the hotels as an extension of their communities.
“We want the towns to love the hotels,” Mallory, wife of the hotels’ founding CEO, Charles Mallory, said of properties that include the Delamar Greenwich Harbor and the Delamar West Hartford.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. There are residents of Southport, a picturesque coastal hamlet of Fairfield that wears its wealth casually, who dine at the Delamar Southport’s Artisan restaurant daily, Mallory added, marveling. And in Greenwich, we have observed that many residents use the Delamar there and its popular L’escale restaurant as a kind of club. (L’escale and the Artisans in Southport and West Hartford are helmed in part by executive chef Frederic Kieffer, whose creations at L’escale include the seasonal Georgette Salad, named for Mallory.)
Photographs of the Delamar Southport Spa courtesy the Delamar Hotels.
In that spirit, she said the Delamars offer a different model – one that sees its spas as a perk and a journey for hotel guests, residents and other visitors alike. The therapist remains with you for the course of your treatment, Mallory said. There’s no leaving you to check in another guest. And she added that she likes to be generous with samples of the spas’ products, which feature the luxe skincare lines Biologique Recherche and Valmont.
“I think Valmont is a very sensual line,” she said of its collection of rich, creamy products that moisturize – key to minimizing wrinkles, Mallory added – feel luxurious and have an intoxicating scent.
She called Biologique Recherche’s Masque Vivant “one of the most efficient products out there” for cleansing and tightening the pores. The products are combined with the latest techniques and technologies, including remodeling, microneedling and Celluma light, to tone and restore the skin in a space that features three treatment rooms with soothing, adjustable, amethyst BioMat treatment tables, a relaxation room, a sauna and a steam shower. (The Delamars also have Bulgari’s gender-neutral, luscious-scented Thé Vert bath products in their rooms and suites, because, Mallory said, luxury hotels should use luxury products.)
The pet-friendly, art-graced Delamars, she added, have an unusual business model as well – one that understands that if you can’t improve on the competition, don’t. So the Delamar Westport, opening later this year, will not have a spa as it is close to the Delamar Southport, a 43-room hotel established in 2009. Westport guests seeking treatments will be shuttled to the Delamar Southport Spa. And the Delamar Mystic, also on the horizon, won’t have a spa either, Mallory said, because that maritime village is already home to an extensive one.
The child of a Greek-born father and a mother who grew up on a Connecticut farm, giving her a foot in both Europe and the United States, Mallory has long been a spa devotee.
“When I was 13, I visited my great aunt, who lived in the Lausanne Palace hotel in (Lausanne,) Switzerland,” she writes in her letter to Delamar spa clients. “I showed up with congested skin, and she looked at me in horror. ‘You need a facial immediately,’ she said. The next day, I found myself lying on a bed in a small room near the lake, where the flicking blue light of a galvanic cell massaged my skin. The aesthetician gave me a milky ‘lait’ that would restore balance to my skin. She gave me a soft face brush to use on my dry skin to stimulate blood flow and exfoliation. It was then that I learned the benefits of a face regimen and protocol.”
It was from her paternal European relatives that Mallory also learned the importance of a more formal approach to dress and a polished appearance, punctuated by regular manicures. She balances this with a refreshingly forthright manner that reflects the American side of her character. Asked about her relatively unusual first name, Mallory said she was named for her paternal grandfather, a George, noting that it was traditional in Greek families to name the oldest son for the paternal grandfather.
“I was the second child and second daughter so by then my father was pretty desperate,” she added to laughter. “My mother preferred (the French) Georgette to the more usual Greek Georgia,” meaning “farmer.”
It would be another Georgette – skincare specialist Klinger – who continued Mallory’s spa education in the 1980s behind the silver doors incised with leaf patterns of her Madison Avenue salon in Manhattan.
“She explained that regular facials were like regular teeth cleanings, part of our hygiene,” Mallory recalled in her letter to Delamar spa clients.
By the time she met her husband in 2003, Mallory – who had run a tutoring business in Greenwich after careers as a research editor for Mademoiselle magazine and a teaching consultant – was full of ideas for his new spa at the Delamar Greenwich Harbor. (They married in 2006.)
“He asked me, ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?’”
As she said in her open letter to clients: “I wanted this European tradition to be found in Greenwich and, when I found Biologique Recherche and Valmont, I knew that I was replicating in the suburbs what I’d discovered in the little room in Lausanne and patronized at Georgette Klinger’s.”
And experienced all over the world when she and her husband travel. Her favorite spa outside of those at the Delamar Hotels? The one at the Four Seasons Resort The Nam Hai in Hoi An, Vietnam.
“It was extraordinary,” she recalled. “You’re in a hut overlooking the water that’s open on three sides. So you have the experience of being embraced by the sky and the sea. It’s amazing.”
But Mallory’s passions embrace the intellectual as well as the sensuous. A graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut; Amherst College in Massachusetts, where she received a bachelor of arts degree in English literature; and Columbia University, from which she received a master of education degree from Teachers College and a master of fine arts in nonfiction writing, Mallory said she is “determined to write a book.”
Perhaps it will explore the world of spas.
