Sylvain Julien: Right at Home

“He likes to keep a low profile,” says Lira Dachlan, public relations manager at The Dharmawangsa, as she leads me through the hotel’s spacious, elegant lobby. “Where would you like to sit?” She stops outside room with beautifully carved wooden chairs and tables. “How about here?” I nod OK. She thinks about it for a minute and changes her mind. “Maybe a nonsmoking room for Pak Julien.”

While we wait, she gives me a quick rundown about the man I’m about to meet: “For someone who’s still in his 30s, Pak Julien has accomplished so much.”

Rumor has it Julien was the youngest person ever to run a five-star hotel in Indonesia, but Lira says he remains unfailingly modest.

“You know, when I told him that he’s going to be profiled, the first thing he asked me was, ‘Why me?’” Lira laughs.

I ask about his personal life. She mentions his marriage to a Frenchwoman, his hobby of photography and his two small children.

“Plus,” she says, “he looks like one of us – a local – and he speaks fluent Indonesian.”

After a moment, the man whose life has been summarized in less than 10 minutes walks into the room. He wears a black suit – the standard of hotel management everywhere – and a red, silver-striped necktie. Lira was right: He does look Indonesian. And, like most Indonesian men, his appearance belies his age.

First things first: How did he end up in Indonesia?

He smiles, then breaks into a grin: “I took a plane.”

He reaches into a snack tray on the table for some roasted nuts. “Well, OK, in 1996, as part of my education, I was required to go abroad for three months and apply what I’d studied thus far. I majored in business, but one that is specifically tied to the Asian market. And I had also been learning Indonesian.”

Why Indonesian?

“To be honest with you, I tried Mandarin, but it was just …” He giggles. “I couldn’t get around it. Then I discovered that Indonesian has more or less the same structure as Malagasy [one of the three official languages in Madagascar, along with French and English]. So I went for it.”

Although he was planning to be in Indonesia for only three months, Julien threw himself into preparing for the journey. He read everything he could get his hands on that would give him clues about where he was heading – articles, books, travel guides. He was well-informed about the country’s demographic, political and economic condition, geographic attributes and popular customs long before his plane touched down at Soekarno-Hatta. When he did arrive in Jakarta, he didn’t hop into a cab like most foreign tourists, but instead boarded the Damri bus to Gambir.

“That was easy – to get from the airport to the bus station,” he chuckles. “But once you’re in Gambir, where do you go and how? Ha, ha!” He had read somewhere that the best place for cheap lodgings in the city was Jalan Jaksa, so off he went. “It wasn’t a hotel so much as it was a motel, of course. But you get a room and a place to crash. It worked out great.”

There, he met travelers from all over the world. They exchanged notes, compared rates and thus began the adventure of a lifetime. Back then, as a student in his mid-20s, he was traveling on a budget. He says now that he wouldn’t have had it any other way, because by traveling like a backpacker he saw aspects of Indonesia a luxury tourist usually misses out on.

Such as discovering how the tastiest Indonesian food is usually found on the streets, from carts and at sidewalk stalls.

“Many foreigners think there’s no great local food in Indonesia the way there is in, say, Thailand,” says Julien, whose personal favorite is dendeng balado (dried beef with chili). “But I don’t think that’s true. You just have to know where to get it.”

He recalls the first time he visited Bandung and explored the city by angkot (a small, public bus): “It was fun!”

During his brief stay in Jakarta, he met with a couple of French businessmen who were running the Accor group and were enthusiastic about opening up a hotel chain throughout the archipelago.

“They hired and sent me to the Ibis Hotel in Mangga Dua,” he says. “I was not a manager or anything like that – I had no professional title, really – because I came from a strictly business background. Therefore, I had much to learn.”

And his first lesson was how to deal with vendors.

“That was how I learned about the 10 percent commission here,” he says. “I didn’t understand why [the vendors] insisted that I take the 10 percent commission, I didn’t even understand what it was for. I said, ‘If you want to give me 10 percent, then just take it off the invoice.’ They said it was for me, not the hotel. I didn’t get it. I went to one of the guys who hired me and he laughed. He told me what it was for, and I was shocked.”

It helps that he has the looks of an Indonesian, because it grants him an unusual bargaining position with the locals, as opposed to the sometimes complicated relationship with other foreign nationals.

He noticed that during his three-month stay in 1996, he was often addressed by the familiar Javanese title Mas.

“It was Mas this, Mas that,” Julien says. “And I thought, I had better brush up on my Indonesian. Maybe I can actually pass as a local. What I did next was go to Gramedia and buy several books on Indonesian pro-kem (slang).”

In actuality, he is Austronesian, a mix between Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander, which explains the resemblance. The first 20 years of his life, Julien spent in his native country and the next nine in Normandy, France, followed by his stint as a hotelier in Indonesia.

Asked if he has adopted Indonesia as his home country, Julien sighs.

“The thing about having lived in different countries for a long period of time is you forget what a home is supposed to be,” he says.

“If the question is work-related, then Indonesia is definitely my home country. If the question is related to my place of birth, or the place where I was raised, where my relatives live, then Madagascar is the answer. But my wife is French and we have a house there that we go back to every couple of times a year, and that’s home, too. So ...”

Nevertheless, Julien says he has grown very fond of the archipelago. In the eight years he spent working for the Accor group, before joining The Dharmawangsa, he had the privilege of living in several parts of Indonesia, including Bukittinggi in West Sumatra and Surakarta in Central Java.

“The greatest asset this country has is its people,” he says, before stopping a moment to reflect silently on his experiences.

“Its diversity is an incredible strength that is uniquely Indonesian and I’m happy to be a part of it.”

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