Amangiri in Canyon Point, Utah. The resort appears camouflaged against the sandstone and limestone formations. carved into sandstone rock formation and encircled by desert landscape. It could be a stand-in for Tatooine in“ Star Wars.”
Doronin is an emphatic, assertive, dogmatic developer. Each project he takes on, he takes on with gusto, married to the details. Like a father, he treats his real estate like children, doting on their every move.“ I create projects like I’ m raising a child,” he said.“ I dress them because I’ m involved in the design. I’ m proud. They are like my children because each of them takes time to grow.” He jokes that he has 84 children worldwide, one for every building he’ s developed.
BORN FOR THIS Real estate is not where Doronin got his start in business. Born in Leningrad, Russia— now Saint Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union— Doronin’ s parents were war survivors and instilled in him values shaped around family, commitment and work ethic.“ They were my motivation to work hard and succeed," he said. His father was a teacher, and as the only son, Doronin was his biggest pupil. He taught him about the world; he took him to the Hermitage Museum as a young boy. Doronin is a keen art collector, a lover of the arts; growing up, he was drawn to Russian Suprematism, which focused on the idea of artistic feeling over realism or figurative depiction of the physical world.( It’ s a credo that unmistakably shows up in the development of Aman.) He was drawn to the works of such luminaries as Kazimir Malevich and Lyubov Popova. Doronin is one of the largest collectors of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the world.
Around 1985, Doronin left Russia for Geneva, Switzerland, where he traded commodities, and resumed the same in Hong Kong in the short while after. He returned to Russia in the early 1990s and started a new track: commercial real estate. Doronin was focused on mixed-use developments and managed to build more than 80 buildings around the world.
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