Interview: Barry Sternlicht on the Launch of His New 1Hotels Brand

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 Hotel