Do we need another hero?
When I entered the world of hotels, at the beginning of the current millennium, there were a handful of creators, originals, with a keen sense of cultural resonance and relevance and their fair share of bravery who were about to change hospitality into something awesome:
Schrager. Balazs. Sendlinger. Zecha. Calderwood. You may add Nick Jones, if you want.
25 years later, we still organize ourselves spiritually around these people, their ideas, their mantras and imperatives. Good for them. Yet, what’s new?
Looking at the masters, some have sold, others have sold out, some have sadly left us, brands like Design Hotels or The Standard try their best to remain relevant, but are essentially just going through the motions, Ace never fixed their succession issue.
Schrager and Sendlinger have moved on, in quite different directions: while Sendlinger is doing arguably the best work of his life, starting at La Granja and now with Reethaus and Casa Noble, he has zero fucks left to give about transforming the industry (and why would he), Schrager has just had his PR folk put a piece into Forbes on how he is “disrupting the industry again” with his “most important idea, ever”. In reality though, Public hotels, which opened already in 2017 and is now about to replicate in Miami to overcome financial hardships, is more of a greatest hits album, the equivalent of the Stones going on tour once more.
New kids, anyone? There are some gorgeous individual projects, from Sanders to Ett Hem to Margot House to some of the places that Iain Ainsworth has curated into his The Afficionados collection, there are a precious few who deliver greatness on a (small) scale, most notably Mexican Grupo Habita and, lately, the Paris-based Experimental Group.
All the rest? So keen to display a pop-cultural with-it-ness that originality is out of the question, prizing imitation over archetype, it’s related to an inflation of aesthetic value, everyone is chasing this and before everyone was chasing that, but all the visual codes fail to fill the emptiness of the design, the absence of both personality and purpose, making all those places the physical equivalents of “um’s” and “like’s”
Or are we just another victim of our homogenizing digital reality, has probability killed originality, has the inevitable outweighed the unexpected (as Kyle Chayka lays out in “Filterworld”)?
In any event, it’s a craft in a coma and while everyone flounders, we wait for the one who figures it out.
Reading about Chris Penn, of both Ace and Birch pedigree, ascending to the throne at Ace though gives me hope.
Will you be our next hero?
(Superman, Andy Warhol, 1981 | We Don’t Need Another Hero, Tina Turner, Mad Max, 1985 | Filterworld – How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka, 2024)
