Hospitality Design - July 2016 - 117

The Electric Room in New York's
Dream Downtown hotel

BRENDAN
MCNAMARA
Executive Vice President

Dream Hotel Group
Panel: NEWH Annual Expo Breakfast: The Young
Entrepreneurs

Recently your company (which you've
been with for 18 years) changed from
Hampshire Hotels to Dream Hotel Group.
Why the new branding?

Which is the most challenging?
[The Dream Hotel in] Doha, in that the project
has a massive amount of public spaces with nine
dining and nightlife outlets. Understanding
what will and won't fly in different
environments is always a fun little puzzle.

What are you most looking forward to?

The Dream Hotels brand has become our bestknown asset and is picking up a lot of steam, so
we decided to capitalize and rebrand as Dream
Hotel Group. It also casts a nice halo on the other
brands-namely Time Hotels and Unscripted
Hotels-that we are expanding alongside Dream.

That's a toss up between [Dream Hotels in]
Nashville and Dallas. Since Dallas is a groundup build, the big Texas sky is pretty much the
limit. Dream Nashville is interesting not only
because the city is one of the most vibrant,
creative, and welcoming places in the U.S., but
because the site is amazing. An assemblage
of several buildings on Printer's Alley will
be rehabbed, and the end result will be a new
social hive for the neighborhood.

What recently completed project are you
most proud of?

What sets the Time and Dream brands
apart in this competitive landscape?

Although this project is not quite open, I am most
proud of [Dream's] move into LA. It pushes the
brand into new territory as a bookend to New
York, but where it is going in Hollywood is equally
exciting. The project will change the landscape of
the Cahuenga corridor.

Both live in the upper-upscale tier of hotels
and both are 'lifestyle.' Dream requires a big
box in a location and community that can
support at least four dining and nightlife venues,
so the prime locations in the top 20 MSAs
[Metropolitan Statistical Areas] domestically.

A guestroom at the upcoming Dream Hollywood, designed by Rockwell Group

The Time is a more streamlined approach to
the segment: one good signature restaurant and
one good lounge is the baseline requirement
and can flex to more secondary or peripheral
locations.

You have worked with some great
talent-Stonehill & Taylor, Rockwell
Group, Meyer Davis Studio, Glen & Co
Architecture, Josh Held Design. How do
you pick collaborators?
We look at not only each project but each venue
individually to see what is the best option for
the occasion and the location. The designer
has to get us and, if it's the right fit, will elevate
us and take us in directions we couldn't have
predicted.

What are some of the interesting F&B
concepts you have created?
F&B is everything. OK, not everything, but
a lot of it. We are building the hotel's ethos
first for the surrounding community. If we
build something that our neighbors love, the
transient guest will too because everyone wants
to get a feel of the locale. In LA it's all about
more is more, so we're bringing a whole pupu
platter of offerings; seven in total. Nashville
will have some hidden spots, somewhat
similar to Dream Downtown's [in New York]
Electric Room. We already had a lot of F&B
going on, but there was no place to hide, so I
hit up our chairman, Sant Chatwal, for about
1,000 square feet in the basement in what was
already assigned as the linen room. At first he
thought I was crazy, but then I explained that
we needed that small, intimate, hidden space
where almost anything could happen, and he
was on board.

Hospitality Design - July 2016

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