Hospitality Design February-March 2023 - 40

perspectives interview
A green and white palette defines the Worksteaddesigned
" garden by the sea " terrace at Canoe Place
Canoe Place's private study features a
built-in sofa festooned with pillows
Jolts of blue and green warm
Canoe Place's neutral lobby
After college you moved to New York for
a career in fashion. What lured you back
to hotels?
In 2011, our family business was evolving. One
of the fi rst generation had passed away and the
second was gett ing ready to do other things.
There are so many takeaways from retail that
apply to hospitality-you create a beautiful
environment, and you provide warm hospitality
when the consumer's engaging with your
products. So, we jumped on board and moved
back from Paris with our litt le boys.
You grew the company, then with just
three hotels, into Main Street Hospitality.
What did you want for this next chapter?
To create a family ethos around hospitality,
around details, around design, around what it
means to operate a hotel that is inextricably
linked with the community. Our properties are
all built on rock-solid relationships.
What was the biggest challenge you
encountered?
Moving out of a corporate environment where
the structure is all there to building one from
040
February/March 2023 hospitalitydesign.com
One of Canoe Place's
calming inn guestrooms
scratch. That entrepreneurial journey was
diff erent, but we've got a foundation now
and a value system established from the very
beginning around enlightened hospitality,
which I stole from my friend Danny Meyer
[of Union Square Hospitality]. When I came
back, I didn't have a playbook. I didn't have 10
years at Marriott . But I started to fi nd great
people who were much smarter than I was
and bring them onto the executive team. My
role has been to make sure we're holding true
to our values, that we're building something
that is meaningful.
Hotel Downstreet will open in May as
part of Main Street Hospitality. What
will that be like?
It is a 1980s Holiday Inn in North Adams,
Massachusett s that we purchased with
Peregrine Group, our partners from
Newport-we have several projects in diff erent
phases of development with them-and we
have been renovating it with DiLeonardo on a
tight budget. It will have simple, lean rooms,
but incredible public spaces. The city has a
whole new wave of energy and investment.
What else is ahead for Main Street
Hospitality?
We're ready now in terms of the
operational platform and leadership
muscle to expand in more scalable ways,
whether it is building a brand out of one of
our hotels, like Hammetts or Porches, and
going more opportunistically to markets,
or partnering with people who have
multiple hotels as opposed to the one-byone
strategy.
How has your time in fashion
informed your hospitality
experience?
I have a good, better, best strategy that
relates back to my retail days. We have
well-designed hotels that have attitude
and are fun, but accessible; beautiful
destination boutique hotels that give you
a feeling of being in the place where you
are; and then at the luxury level we just
opened Canoe Place, which has been a
labor of love. We're building a layer cake of
different things that we can do well. hd
http://www.hospitalitydesign.com
Hospitality Design February-March 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design February-March 2023
