Hospitality Design - November 2016 - 120

Dinner for 300 atop Powder Mountain

Griffin Loop's "Inward Perspectives" sculpture

property. This summer we're going vertical
on half a dozen houses, so the whole project is
progressing. There are incredible people who are
property owners and part of the development,
like Richard Branson; Blake Mycoskie, the
founder of Toms shoes; Tim Ferriss, who has
the most successful podcast in the world; and
Reed Hastings, the founder and chairman of
Netflix. It's interesting. We've almost built the
whole thing backwards, right? We had a vibrant,
flourishing, engaged community of, say, 10,000
people and we decided to build the real estate to
catch up and support our ethos.

In 2011 you put everyone on a boat for
Summit at Sea, now an annual event.
We had grown from 300 people at a Miami
event to 750 at one in Washington, DC. We
wanted to find a way to capture all of that
interest, and we needed a venue that would
basically allow for the growth of the community
and the evolution of the format. A cruise
ship was a great place for that-a contained
environment that allows you as a producer to
have much more control over what's happening.
With a traditional setting, you can very easily
bleed out a lot of the energy because people get
distracted and go.

Are there any notable design plans?
The whole idea of community moving from
economic stratification to a group of people
who are ideologically aligned is powerful.
We've figured out how to balance different
price points inside the same development
without eroding the value. We've embraced a
design philosophy that is effectively organic
modernism, where we want modern shapes but
with heritage materiality, like a contemporary
bar with reclaimed wood and old sheet metal.
People aren't allowed to build on the ridge tops.
There's a maximum cap on the buildable square
footage of properties so nobody gets to have the
biggest house on the mountain. We want all the
structures to stay modest. There are a dozen
architects or firms, like Tom Kundig [of Olson
Kundig], whose work reflects the ideals of the
community and what we want the end product
to look like. But we want people to have a choice
of who to work with at the end of the day as long
as it's within design guidelines.

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November 2016 hospitalitydesign.com

How do you view Summit's effect on
culture?
There are a lot of event producers who don't
think of themselves as artists and don't think
of what they're doing as art. We choose to think
about our community as a social sculpture and
our events as experience design. When I see
other events that have a similar look, feel, or
taste to Summit, I don't see them as a threat.
There's so much mediocre product out there
that is created just for enterprise value, to make
profit, and expose people to big brands. When
somebody has an authentic experience with a
product that is created with a higher level of
integrity and clear goals, you never go back. The
idea of this community is that it has the ability
to provide anything for anyone. Some people
come to Summit and make best friends, new
business partners, or a bunch of investments.
Some just want to see the music, eat great food,
and learn from amazing content.

In the future do you see Summit
represented more by physical spaces or a
virtual community?
We have to bridge the gap and play in both spaces.
One only strengthens the other. While the physical
spaces catch up to the ideological development,
we're launching a piece of technology in the
coming months that has geolocation features
and basically connects our entire community. If
I'm going to London for the weekend, I can open
the app and see who else from the community
is there. If I need a place to stay, restaurant
recommendations, or if I want to meet people in
a specific industry, there's a level of appropriate
outreach there for collaboration in a place that I
don't know well and other people do.

Has there been a great lesson learned
along the way from developing Summit?
This is a project that I've been working on, all of
us have been working on, for years, and it's just
now starting to go vertical. But there's so much
work that goes into it that it consistently teaches
you patience and to surrender to the process. It can
be disheartening at times, but the knowledge that
everything is happening, maybe not at the speed
that my ego would like it to, is really calming.

To go along with this issue's new icons
theme, who are you paying attention to?
Claus Sendlinger, founder and CEO of Design
Hotels, who is now developing beyond boutique
hotels-thoughtful, small properties with robust
programming and authentic community. And
Tony Cho, who is developing the first communityoriented planned urban development in downtown
Miami called Magic City. He's also developing
a butterfly garden and the first micro units in
Wynwood.

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Hospitality Design - November 2016

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