Skift Take
1Hotels is helping establish the upscale green bohemian trend in hospitality design that prioritizes the essential in a more creative and less contrived way.
If you’re the person who created W Hotels and St. Regis Hotels, where do you go after that?
Barry Sternlicht, founder and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, launched Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 1995 at a time when the design hotel trend in North America was just beginning to gain steam as a small hospitality niche. Envisioning a much broader appeal of that trend, Sternlicht delivered W Hotels to the world in 1998 and changed the hotel industry forever by proving the demand for design-conscious guest experiences among the mainstream traveling public.
Yesterday, Sternlicht launched 1 Hotels with the opening of 1 Hotel South Beach. The waterfront property is among the largest on the beach, fronting the equivalent of two football fields of sand. The building was also originally built as a luxury condo-hotel, much later than all of the neighboring Art Deco hotels, so the 426 rooms average 700 square feet, or double the size of most standard rooms today.
Two more 1 Hotels are scheduled to open later this year in Manhattan (1 Hotel Central Park) and DUMBO across the river (1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge Park).
During his ten years as CEO of Starwood Hotels, Sternlicht developed or acquired hotel brands covering every market segment, including one of the earliest soft hotel brands, Starwood Luxury Collection. To follow that up with another hotel concept that was defined purely by its physical countenance and style didn't really excite Sternlicht.
Instead, he opted to build what he emphasizes is a "platform" to spread a message about human society’s relationship with the built environment. He says we’re junking up the world everywhere you look, from the “5 Gyres” of floating plastic flotsam in the oceans to many Asian megacities cloaked in pollution.
Sternlicht wants to set the table for that discussion. His design misson focuses more on the essential and ineffable, so it's all about being less contrived and more creative in an organic way, with a more tactile engagement with nature. Although, he says, the 1 Hotels brand aligns with the forefront of hospitality in 2015 in terms of the hotel assets and guest experience, regardless of the sustainability mission. The purpose of the eco-sensitive context is really primarily to create a platform for guests to share that discussion with like-minded people.
We spoke with Sternlicht to learn a little more about that purpose.
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