Talk about starting the day with an Apple. At 9.30 am, Priya Paul, chairperson, Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels, is peering at the screen of a designer's Apple Powerbook and discussing a makeover for The Park Hotel in Kolkata. The 24-hour restaurant, Zest, is awash in daylight. The symmetry of the spotless white walls is offset by a curved service counter and traditional patterns in red and orange on the far wall. Large glass windows overlook the elliptical black pool framed by the wooden deck of The Park's signature poolside restaurant, Aqua.

Meeting done, the designer repairs to an adjoining table. It's your turn and 40-year-old Paul decides she's asking the first round of questions. "What do you think of the hotel?" she quizzes, straight off the bat. "Would you like some breakfast? How about some coffee? Juice? Is that your photographer setting up by the poolside? Have you been to any of our other hotels?" You finally manage to get a word in edgeways. How would she like to be addressed? "Just call me Priya."

So you ask Paul why The Park chose Navi Mumbai when all their other hotels are city centre properties. "Well, this is technically the centre of the city," she laughs and goes on to add that the family bought the property a long time ago. "My uncle had the foresight to invest in Navi Mumbai nearly 20 years ago and the land was sanctioned for a hotel site. But the area has really come into its own in the last four or five years. There is a lot of business activity; there are about five malls coming up nearby. Navi Mumbai has now become a hub in itself. And people doing business here end up staying at the airport hotels and commuting every day. So, about two years ago, we decided it was time to develop the property as it would give us a presence in Mumbai and we could start making a return on our investment."

She cites Vishakapatnam (Vizag) as another example. "Vizag, like Navi Mumbai, was pegged to grow as the next big city. My family had invested in Vizag 40 years ago because they believed it had potential. I have to say the city has gone through many ups and downs in terms of occupancy, infrastructure levels and investment. But over the past three years, there has been a lot of business focus on Vizag. There's the SEZ, more and more BPO and IT companies coming up. Income levels are rising so the food and beverage (F & B) scene is quite lively too. It's a small hotel, just 61 rooms but they all have bay windows that offer spectacular views of the sea."

Paul started out at the Delhi property in 1988 as marketing manager but two years later, when her father was killed by militants in the north-east, her responsibility multiplied several times over and she was on a steep learning curve. "We had three hotels then but no common vision or personality and the three hotels existed as more or less separate entities. I had to set up systems, processes, look at human resources, training. I knew a little bit about the hotel business but I was not a hotelier at all. Which may have been a good thing, actually," she grins.

"I had studied in the United States and Ian Schraeger's boutique hotel had just opened around that time in Manhattan. I looked at that and at our hotels; we were very small and had just three properties. I questioned how we could have a really distinctive chain and compete with larger hotel chains. You must remember the hotel industry then was not hot as it is now. How could we be distinctive? How could we be more meaningful? These were questions I kept asking. I was in my early 20s then and I asked how a hotel could be a more exciting place for me."

Paul decided that she would model The Park as India's first chain of boutique hotels. While the concept was popular overseas, virtually no one had heard of boutique hotels in India. So, she brought in master designers like Terence Conran and Hirsch Bedner and went about creating a chain of hotels where each property was unique in itself while still being part of a larger vision and brand architecture.

"I remember we were renovating The Park, Kolkata and the design for the oriental restaurant had already been sanctioned. It was all red and green and sort of Chinese. I said, sorry, we can't have this, let's look at something else. So we went back to the drawing board and evolved a more minimal design with lots of black and lots of white and that's where we really started to use design as a differentiator. Our vision statement is 'Leadership through differentiation' and this vision translates into our product, our service, our people and even in the way we look at spaces."