Bill Bensley is world renown for his outstanding, unique and inspiring award-wining hotel, landscape and interior designs and eye-catching architecture. What is not so widely known, but comes as no surprise to those that know him, is that he is a concerned conservationist and passionate philanthropist and an eco-warrior. In his own words Bill shares, “my main purpose in life, besides having as much fun as possible, is to help the needy, to education, help animals and help the planet via conservation”.

Bill has seamlessly and brilliantly combined his work with these two passions to benefit the environments and communities in which he has created his incredible projects. He celebrates the 30th anniversary of BENSLEY Design Studios in 2020 and is proud and humbled by the many awards the hotels he has designed have won as well as those bestowed on him personally for design, leadership and sustainability.

Born in California, his parents were English immigrants. His family had a small farm where they were pretty much self-sustaining, raising bees, quails, chickens, ducks and rabbits and growing mushrooms and a huge variety of veggies in a garden complete with a compost heap. They would travel as a family in their little trailer almost every weekend to a camp spot close by and in the summer they would travel all over the states. He grew up with a great love for the wilderness and learnt how to sustain the family with food. It makes him smile to hear the word sustainability used so frequently these days as though it is a new idea.

Affectionately known as the “Willy Wonka of Design”, Bill is a jack of all trades - gardener, fisherman, architect, interior designer, lover of all things natural, and most of all, a wide-ranging explorer of as many corners of the earth as he can. Raised amidst the orange trees of California, the Harvard Graduate took off for Asia the day after graduation and never looked back. After a few years working in Hong Kong and Singapore, he set up shop in Bangkok in 1989, soon followed by a BENSLEY branch in Bali in 1990. With a team of 150 interior designers, architects, landscape designers, artists and makers of all things beautiful - as well as his husband Jirachai and their six Jack Russells - Bensley has brought to life over 200 resorts, hotels and palaces in over 30 countries, and is on a never-ending quest to create their best work yet.

Over the years Bensley has become known as a hotel designer who integrates sustainability into all of his designs, and is now hoping to share this knowledge with as many people as possible, in the hopes that if the hospitality industry bands together, they might be able to do their bit in reversing climate change.