Henry Maksoud

The hotel industry is shattered.

He graduated in engineering from Universidade Mackenzie in 1951, and followed it with a master’s degree in fluid mechanics and hydraulics from the University of Iowa in 1953. This is not the biography of a hospitality man. It is the biography of a technician — someone trained to calculate load-bearing capacities and water flows, not to charm guests or curate a lobby. That distinction is worth holding onto, because it explains something essential about how Maksoud would eventually build a hotel: he approached it the way an engineer approaches an infrastructure problem, with specifications, tolerances, and an insistence on getting the physical structure exactly right, whatever the cost to schedule or nerves.

In 1958 he founded Hidroservice, an engineering consultancy that would go on to do work associated with the Galeão and Manaus airports and, later, the Itaipu hydroelectric project — among the largest infrastructure undertakings in Brazil’s twentieth century. By the time most entrepreneurs are still finding their footing, Maksoud had already built a serious engineering firm with a footprint in the country’s largest infrastructure projects. He was, in other words, a self-made industrialist a full two decades before the hotel that would make him famous even existed as an idea.

He was also, by temperament, unwilling to stay in one lane. In 1974 he acquired Visão, a national magazine, and became a publisher and public intellectual in his own right. He translated the work of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek — by hand, on a typewriter, according to accounts of his working habits — and hosted Hayek’s visits to Brazil, aligning himself publicly with a strand of economic liberalism that was, in 1970s Brazil, a minority position worth defending loudly. An engineer who built airports, a publisher who translated Hayek, a man who would later host his own television programme: by the mid-1970s, Henry Maksoud had already assembled an unusually varied résumé for someone whose best-known achievement had not yet been built.

The site nobody thought a hotel needed #

What Maksoud wanted, starting in the mid-1970s, was to build São Paulo’s first international-standard five-star hotel. This requires some explanation, because the ambition was not obviously reasonable. São Paulo in the 1970s was Brazil’s commercial and industrial capital — a city of factories, banks, and traffic, not a city that had cultivated a tourist identity or, by extension, an obvious market for the kind of hotel found in London, New York, or Hong Kong. Brazil, meanwhile, was entering what would later be remembered as an economic “lost decade” — the oil-shock years that strangled growth and made large private capital commitments look, to anyone with a banker’s instincts, imprudent.

Maksoud was not deterred by any of this. He wanted a specific site — one occupied, at the time, by a heritage-listed convent — and he pursued it with the same directness he brought to closing an engineering contract. On 6 May 1976, the project won approval; the heritage listing on the convent was lifted the very next day, following what accounts describe as a personal appeal Maksoud made to the mayor. It is a small episode, but a revealing one. Getting a historic building de-listed on a single day’s notice, through direct persuasion of the city’s chief executive, is not the kind of outcome available to a timid applicant. It was an early demonstration of the force of will that would carry the project — not always smoothly — through the three years of construction that followed.

The hotel that resulted would be financed, Maksoud insisted, with private and wholly national capital — a detail he and his team made a point of publicizing in period advertising, at a moment when many Brazilians, watching the economy contract, feared for the country’s future. The figure attached to the project was substantial: something in the neighborhood of US$40 million, according to a 1980 account in Folha de S.Paulo, with the hotel’s own architect separately citing a slightly higher figure closer to US$45 million. Whichever number one credits, the scale of the commitment was, for a single Brazilian entrepreneur in the depths of the 1970s downturn, extraordinary — a private bet made against the prevailing economic mood, funded without the foreign capital or state backing that might have made it look safer to outside observers.

The atrium that nearly broke the schedule #

No first-hand account survives — at least none this research located — of Maksoud narrating, in his own words, what it felt like to carry that risk through construction. What survives instead is testimony from the people who worked alongside him, and it paints a vivid picture of a man under sustained, almost obsessive pressure to get one particular architectural gesture right.

The hotel’s atrium was Maksoud’s signature demand — the element he was determined would set the property apart from anything else in Brazil. Partway through construction, the project’s architect, Paulo Lúcio de Brito, toured a set of American hotels and came back convinced the atrium design needed to change fundamentally: from four apartment wings arranged around the space to two. This was not a cosmetic revision. It meant re-submitting the design to city hall for fresh approval, mid-build, on a schedule that had no slack to give. Brito later recalled the toll of the redesign in specific, almost clinical terms: he lost 13 kilos over nine months on site, working under what he called enormous pressure, with Maksoud arriving to check progress every day at eleven in the morning and telephoning again, sometimes, at three in the morning.

That detail — the 3 a.m. phone calls — says more about Maksoud’s state of mind during those months than any quote of his own could. This was a man who could not let the project rest, who needed to know, at every hour, whether the thing he had staked forty million dollars and his own name on was still on track. It is not hard to imagine the private question underneath the pressure: had he been right to believe a business city with no tourist identity, in the middle of an economic contraction, would support an international-standard luxury hotel financed entirely with his own country’s capital? Or had he simply been delusional?

There is no verbatim record of Maksoud voicing that doubt. What exists instead is the evidence of how he behaved under it — the daily visits, the middle-of-the-night calls, the insistence on redesigning rather than compromising the atrium — and the outcome he ultimately delivered.

Eighteen months, and an answer #

Construction that had begun in the shadow of a redesigned atrium and a compressed schedule nonetheless reached completion in roughly eighteen months from the point the revised plans were approved. The hotel opened in 1979, with an official inauguration on 1 January 1980, offering 416 apartments — a scale that, at the time, had no domestic peer. Maksoud Plaza was marketed, pointedly, as a hotel built with private and wholly national capital, at a moment when Brazilians were nervous about the country’s economic direction. The claim functioned as both a factual detail and a statement of confidence: Maksoud was telling the market that Brazilian capital, deployed with conviction, could build something world-class without leaning on foreign investors or the state.

The proof came quickly. Maksoud Plaza became São Paulo’s first five-star hotel and, within two years, a genuine national landmark. In August 1981, Frank Sinatra performed a run of shows at the property — an event that did more to cement the hotel’s international reputation than any advertisement could have. Over the roughly four decades that followed, the hotel would go on to host more than three million guests, a figure that stands, in its own right, as a measure of what Maksoud’s eighteen-month gamble ultimately built.

The publisher, the professor, and the television host #

Maksoud’s identity never narrowed to hotelier, even after the Plaza made him famous. He continued running Hidroservice and Visão alongside the hotel, and in the late 1980s he added a new role to an already crowded résumé: from 1988 to 1991 he hosted his own television programme, Henry Maksoud e Você — a platform, by all appearances, for the same combination of economic argument and personal conviction he had spent the 1970s pouring into Visão’s pages and Hayek’s translated essays. It is an unusual thing for a hotel founder to also be a television personality and a translator of Austrian economics, and it says something about the range of ambitions Maksoud carried simultaneously. He was never content to be known for one achievement, even when that achievement was as singular as São Paulo’s first five-star hotel.

The lament of 2003 #

Two decades after the hotel opened, the tone of Maksoud’s public statements had changed. In 2003, marking the property’s 25th anniversary, he told Folha de S.Paulo, “A indústria hoteleira está destroçada” (“The hotel industry is shattered”). It is a striking sentence from a man who had spent his career projecting the opposite of doubt, and it deserves to be read for what it is: not a comment on the founding-era gamble, which by then had long since paid off, but a lament about what had happened to the broader Brazilian hotel sector, and, implicitly, about the debt and financial strain that were by then closing in on his own company. It is the closest thing in the public record to Maksoud acknowledging, in his own voice, that the industry he had once bet everything on had become a harder business than the one he had entered in 1976.

Five years later, in 2008, he was still fighting on the record — this time over the process by which some of his assets came under scrutiny. He told O Estado de S. Paulo, “Todo o processo que levou a esse leilão estava prenhe de ilegalidades” (“The entire process that led to this auction was rife with illegalities”). Whatever the merits of that specific dispute, the quote captures a man in his late seventies still willing to fight publicly for what he believed was his, decades after the qualities that built the hotel — stubbornness, a refusal to accept the easy no, a willingness to phone at three in the morning — had made him famous in the first place.

What he left unresolved #

Henry Maksoud died of lung cancer on 17 April 2014, at the age of 85. He had handed the presidency of the company to his grandson a year earlier, a transition that, on its face, looked like an orderly succession. It was not. What his death exposed — quickly, and publicly — was the absence of any durable plan for what would happen to an empire built almost entirely around one man’s judgment, one man’s relationships with bankers and city officials, and one man’s insistence on doing things his own way.

That is, in the end, the shape of Henry Maksoud’s own story, distinct from what happened to the company after he was gone. He was an engineer who built airports, a publisher who translated Hayek on a typewriter, a television host, and — above everything else — the man who bet US$40 million of his own country’s capital on the belief that São Paulo could support a hotel as good as anything in London or New York. He delivered that hotel in eighteen months, under a level of personal pressure that his own architect’s body kept a record of, in kilos lost. He did not leave a comparable record of how the company should run without him. The gap between those two facts is the founder’s story in full: a man who could design and will into being a five-star hotel where skeptics saw a business city with no use for one, but who never applied the same rigor to the question of who would carry it forward when he no longer could.

Last updated: July 21, 2026