At Yale University, Katherine Lo was an enthusiastic activist. Officially, she studied visual art and anthropology; unofficially, she gawked at Louis Kahn’s architecture, all the while tackling such issues as climate change and free trade as an undergraduate. “Now, I would call myself more of an ally in that I’m helping to repurpose hospitality spaces as a resource for activists,” says Lo, founder and president of newly minted brand Eaton Workshop, a hotel company that champions positive change through platforms via a duo of properties in Washington, DC and Hong Kong.
As the daughter of Lo Ka Shui, the executive director of Hong Kong-based Great Eagle Holdings, which is the parent company of luxury brand Langham Hospitality, Lo wasn’t all that amped about joining the family business until her grandfather (who founded Great Eagle) started talks about converting Mies van der Rohe’s early-1970s minimalist IBM tower into the Langham, Chicago. “I was fascinated by the fact that this historic, iconic building was going to become a Langham,” says Lo, who soon began tagging along with her father to architecture and design meetings, eventually representing him at them. This vast landmark preservation project involved close collaborations between Lo and Richmond International, Rockwell Group, and Dirk Lohan, van der Rohe’s grandson, of Lohan Anderson.
After the hotel opened in 2013, however, Lo realized that luxury “didn’t feel like my true purpose or calling, or even the style I wanted to keep working on,” so she returned to filmmaking (she received a master’s in film production from the University of Southern California) until her father presented her with a new challenge: develop a hotel brand from scratch for the burgeoning lifestyle segment.
This resonated on a more profound level with Lo, who dreamed up Eaton with aspirations of building a social movement around a “specific point of view that you’re not afraid to stick to and up for.” Eaton hotels double as inclusive community centers, celebrating partnerships with grassroots leaders and nonprofits. They also prioritize sustainability by illuminating such concerns as food waste, sprouting urban farms on rooftop terraces, and being built to LEED standards.
Eaton DC, the handiwork of New York firms Gachot Studios and Parts and Labor Design, opened last year amid a time of political tumult. Lo says the 209-room hotel that calls to mind its bygone days as a bus terminal, complete with a library, radio station, cinema, and the 20,000-square-foot coworking hangout Eaton House, only “added more urgency because to have a place that supports environmentalism and gender equality meant a lot more.”
Almost simultaneously, the 465-room Eaton Hong Kong debuted in Kowloon “in a trippy building that looks like it came out of Blade Runner,” Lo points out, with a design courtesy of AvroKO’s Bangkok practice. The firm’s San Francisco office (in conjunction with Leong Leong) will handle the forthcoming new-build hotel in that city, while Tokyo architect Kengo Kuma is tasked with a ground-up building in Seattle.
Lo is on the lookout for potential new sites to grow the Eaton portfolio, but she’s also focusing on expanding the culture, impact, and wellness programming at each property, noting DC’s wellness center, which offers amenities that nurture inner health and spiritual development. “Now that these beautiful spaces are designed, the hardware is done, so I’m focusing on making sure that the software is maximizing the potential,” she says. At the same time, she’s developing Eaton Media, a sub-branch of the company that will create original content in film, prose, and photography. “My dream would be for Eaton to not only be a hotel brand, but [also] to reach the level of being a social or cultural movement,” she says, “an authentic platform for the global community to make a better world.”
Photography by Juliet Berman, Lit Ma, Adrian Gaut, and Jennifer Hughes
