Louis Li, hotel entrepreneur

Louis Li was full of plans for this year but life had other ideas.

Louis Li

For the first time in his life, Louis Li was forced to stop. The 32 year old has not taken time off since he opened the groundbreaking Jackalope Hotel in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 2017. He has staged a wildly successful modern art installation in Melbourne, and bought the Sydney bakery behind Instagram’s most famous cake. He has also been planning a second Jackalope, and has travelled extensively both overseas and domestically.

But that all came to a grinding halt in March this year when COVID shut borders and businesses and kept us in our homes. For Li, being in Victoria meant there were only a few weeks of reprieve in the middle of the year before the state went into a more severe second-wave lockdown that lasted almost four months.

“In previous years with Jackalope, I always wanted more and more,” Li explains. “I would drive the projects so hard and so ambitiously, but this was a forced pause for me, and I have finally had the time to stop and reflect on what I have done and achieved. I have just become very appreciative and very grateful for what I have rather than always thinking about what I want next.”

Li concedes that this is a “very weird switch” for him, this change in his definition of accomplishment. “If can I manage what I have well during these challenging times, that is a success,” he says. “It is all about cash flow and payroll, and keeping all the core team on board so we have that resilience and potential so we can reopen [from COVID-19 lockdowns]. I am so glad I haven’t lost any important core team members since we started working on Jackalope. They are still with me four years on, we are still together and I think that is a huge achievement.”

Li, who was born in China and first came to Melbourne in 2007 to study film at RMIT University, is also very grateful that he has been able to come back at all as many hospitality operators have not been so lucky. He says they did a home delivery service for Jackalope restaurants Rare Hare and Doot Doot Doot, and this kept them going during the lockdowns. They stopped the service after the city reopened in November as demand came roaring back and Jackalope bookings returned.

The other key takeaway from the 15-week lockdown was the number of movies and books Li consumed at home, as well as a newfound appreciation for exercise. “I love it so much more, because at one stage you were only allowed out for one hour for exercise so you really cherished this time and made the most of it,” he says. “I do exercise more frequently than I did before COVID.”

WISH first interviewed Li almost three years ago when Jackalope opened, but he is still surprised at how successful the hotel has been. He never thought it would be so well received let alone become the country’s most awarded hotel, garnering luxury, travel and design honours. “I took quite a risky approach,” he says of his very first venture. “I did fully express my aesthetic and the things I loved like art and hospitality, and integrated them on quite a deep level. I thought I was targeting quite a niche audience, but I ended up with much broader appeal. The vision turned out to be not too avant-garde for the general market and that surprised me.”

In the time since then he has gone beyond hotels, buying Sydney’s Black Star Pastry in 2018. The bakery, which chef Christopher Thé started in 2008 in a tiny store in Newtown, went global on social media after making a particularly photogenic (and very delicious) strawberry watermelon cake. “I have never seen a singular product have that much broad appeal to both domestic and international customers,” Li says. “It just appeals to everyone’s palate and it looks amazing. I think by putting a business structure into the brand it has potential to grow even further.”

Li now has three Black Star Pastry stores in Sydney and one in Melbourne, and they sell a mind-boggling one million pieces of strawberry and watermelon cake a year. It is popular with both locals and tourists. “I think it has already proven a national treasure in Australia and it has the potential to reach Aussie icon status in an international landscape,” he says.

After conquering cake, Li turned his attention to a modern art exhibit he saw in LA and decided to bring to Melbourne. Rain Room – which allows visitors to walk through the rain without getting wet – opened in a purpose-built pavilion in St Kilda last August and had an incredible 90,000 visitors in its first seven months. Li reckons it would have hit 100,000 but the pandemic shut it down. It is due to reopen on December 5 and will continue as long as there is interest.

“It is made for social distancing, because the parameter of the rain really keeps others away and to have the best possible experience you have to have distance from others,” he says. “It is just so calming and meditative too when you walk through the rain slowly. Many people have told me it is just beautiful for their mental health, so I will keep it open as long as demand doesn’t drop.”

And while a COVID-forced pause this year may have led Li to some realisations about himself and his own success, that doesn’t mean that he will be staying still for much longer. As soon as the borders reopen he will be off to seek out new experiences around the world.

“I have realised how important an unfamiliar environment is for me,” he says. “I need that foreignness. I cannot live in an environment where I am familiar with everything as that bores me. I think my brain functions differently because I absorb so much more information in other places. It’s been very strange for me to stop that travel and just live a very ordinary daily life for eight months.”