Andrew Alford first caught the hospitality bug when he was 19, working a roller coaster at an Ohio theme park. “It was a public-facing form of escapism that was very healthy,” he says. “For the two-and-a-half minutes they’re on that ride, they’re not thinking about the bills they have to pay, relationship challenges, or illness. It’s pure escapism. I loved providing that service.”
Alford joined AJ Capital Partners in 2013, where owner and founder Ben Weprin pitched him the idea of Graduate as a new type of hotel that celebrated college towns, which often lacked vibrant lifestyle properties. It was a perfect fit for Alford, who took what he learned from his time working at Universal Studios and Kimpton Hotels and merged those lessons into a concept that is at once nostalgic and eclectic. The brand, he says, “rekindles those feelings of camaraderie, of new experiences and ideas” that comes with the wide-eyed excitement of being an undergrad. He calls the design strategy a “greatest hits radio station,” using the local history of small college markets to create playful, colorful guest experiences. “We’re writing a love letter to each one of these communities,” Alford says, “and you can’t plagiarize a love letter.”
From the beginning, Alford was embedding parts of himself into the design. At the inaugural Athens, Georgia property, an 1850s iron foundry was renovated into a lobby and live music venue to celebrate Alford’s love of rock band R.E.M., which hails from the southern town. The aesthetic of the Tempe, Arizona Graduate, meanwhile, was inspired by photos from his grandparents’ vacations he longed to go on. “It’s almost like therapy, working out these ideas and resolving them through design,” he says.
It still plays into his ethos today. A self-declared “sneaker and shoe freak,” Alford outfitted the lobby at the recently opened Graduate Eugene in Oregon with a front desk display case housing the first four generations of Nike shoes (the company was founded there) from the ’70s, including a pair made for the 1972 Olympic running team, as well as a wall of 135 vintage Nike posters.
The Eugene property is one of 10 the brand is slated to open this year, adding to its portfolio of 16 (23 are in the design phase). In addition to its first international property in Cambridge, England, Graduate is also expanding to primary markets, including the recently opened Seattle outpost, with New York (Snøhetta is designing the 18-story hotel’s sleek façade for Cornell’s Tech campus on Roosevelt Island) and Nashville on the boards.
Despite this move to more urban settings, the brand’s cheeky personality remains intact. In Nashville, for example, an all-pink rooftop watering hole and a ground-floor karaoke bar are in the works, the latter putting singers on stage with Chuck E. Cheese-style animatronic animals.
For Alford, he says the spectacle remains cathartic. “It brings me back to those two minutes somebody is riding a roller coaster and not thinking about their problems. We want the same thing with our properties.”
An oversized duck toy in the Graduate Eugene’s lobby playfully references the University of Oregon’s mascot
In the Graduate Eugene, a dramatic installation of 135 vintage Nike posters line a lobby wall
The presidential suite at the Graduate Eugene combines natural wood with textured patterns
The lobby at the Graduate Seattle employs a 1930s Art Deco aesthetic
The newly opened Graduate Columbia
