Amir Benesh: the man who turned a good recommendation into a business

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WAYFARER · People

Born on a kibbutz in the Negev, trained in airline security in Paris, the builder of one of the largest vacation home operations in the world. From Miami, Amir Benesh now bets that the rarest thing a traveller can have is not a key, but a good introduction.

Some clubs are measured by their address. Amir Benesh’s is measured by the people he can introduce to one another. It is an unusual yardstick for a man who spent a quarter of a century in the business of houses, but it is the one that explains everything he has built, and everything he is building now.

From the Negev to Manhattan

Benesh was born in 1969 on Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, in Israel’s Negev desert, a place where almost everything is shared and nobody is a stranger for long. In 1987 he went to New York to visit his brother, then a student at NYU, and did not really come back. Before real estate there was Paris, where he worked as a security officer for El Al, a job that teaches you to read a room in seconds and to trust very few people.

He found his way into property management and, with it, into the less glamorous side of the market: his company handled foreclosed properties for institutions such as the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank Leumi. The first place he bought for himself was a penthouse on the Upper West Side. The advice he still gives to anyone starting out is short enough to fit on a card.

“Focus on the concept and be consistent.”

The house as the product

The idea for what came next arrived on holiday. Benesh rented a villa in Europe with friends and realised that what he remembered was not the thread count, but the house itself: sharing it, cooking in it, the long evenings. He co-founded LVH Global in the mid-2010s around that insight. Within a few years the company, by its own account, was managing more than five thousand homes in some forty countries, from villas and mansions to yachts and private islands. By 2020, Forbes was describing a portfolio of around seven thousand homes across nearly a hundred destinations.

The model was hands-on. Local teams inspected every house before it was listed. Chefs, private aviation catering and access to the weeks that matter, Coachella and Cannes among them, were part of the offer. The Zenyara estate in the Coachella Valley, rented for festival season by the Hadid sisters, became one of its best-known addresses. “We are all about personalisation,” Benesh said at the time: learning what a guest likes to eat, to listen to, to watch. During the pandemic, LVH turned some of its homes into lots at virtual charity galas, raising funds alongside Mount Sinai.

A club without a front door

Kimani was more than a decade in the making. Benesh presented it on 24 May 2024, during the Cannes Film Festival, to a small group of guests, under the name Kimani Life. Today it is Kimani Club, headquartered in Miami, and its network spans more than a hundred destinations.

There is no clubhouse with a fireplace and no waiting list at reception. Kimani works as a network. In each city there are local ambassadors, people who know which table is worth the evening, which house never appears on any platform and which boat leaves early when the harbour fills up. The member does not search. The member asks someone who knows. According to the club, it now counts on more than ninety hosts, around a thousand local ambassadors and some five thousand vetted service providers.

Entry is by recommendation, and it is the ambassadors who open the door. It is the oldest model there is, the personal introduction, now organised on a digital platform and an app that do the job once reserved for a very well guarded address book.

“My passion has always been about connecting people with cultures, places, and experiences that leave a lasting impact.”

The recent work

The last twelve months have been the busiest in Kimani’s short life. In October 2025, Benesh formally took on the role of chief executive and put the Kimani app into beta on iOS and Android. That same month he took the club to TOKEN2049 at Marina Bay Sands, in Singapore, to present a system of verified member identity and reputation, the digital version of what used to be a friend vouching for a friend.

In 2026 he did something few private clubs would consider: he opened part of the company to its own community, through a crowdfunding round on Wefunder, with LDJ Capital among its backers. According to the campaign, Kimani has more than seven thousand verified members in twenty-five countries. And in May, as every year, he hosted the Kimani evening at a villa in Cannes during the festival. WAYFARER was there. A house instead of a hotel ballroom, guests brought by members and ambassadors, and a host more interested in introducing people than in being introduced.

The map

Benesh has lived in New York, Miami, Paris, Ibiza, Mykonos and St. Tropez, and the club follows the same route. St. Barths and Mykonos, Ibiza and St. Tropez, Monaco and Switzerland, London, Paris and Milan, New York, Miami, the Hamptons and Los Angeles, Dubai and Tokyo. In each of them, Kimani brings together homes for the season, concierge, a network of providers chosen one by one and gatherings between members, from small dinners to the bigger nights of the weeks that count.

What links such different addresses is not the standard of the finishes, it is the judgement of whoever recommends them. A villa in St. Barths and a restaurant in Tokyo reach the member by the same route: someone local, who has been there, said it was worth it.

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Amir Benesh grew up in a place where everything was shared and everyone knew everyone. Half a century later, he has built something close to its opposite and, at the same time, its continuation: a kibbutz scattered across the world, where members never share a roof, but share the one thing that cannot be bought with two taps on a screen. The trust of a good introduction.

Gabriel Silveirado, for WAYFARER. Cannes and Miami, with gratitude to Amir Benesh.