“I grew up in the business and learned about hotels at the dinner table,” says Michael Fuerstman, co-founder and creative director of lifestyle brand Pendry Hotels, and the son of career hotelier Alan Fuerstman, founder and CEO of Montage Hotels & Resorts.
He started in the hospitality industry when he was only 15 years old, as a pool boy at the Bellagio in Las Vegas (his father was the hotel’s opening vice president of hotel operations). “That was my first job—the best one I have ever had,” he says. While at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, he worked summers at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge—learning the ropes while trying his hand at every front-of-the-house position, even working a stint as night auditor.
Even so, after graduating with a degree in political science, he tried to avoid the family business and helped found mobile social networking startup SocialMonkey.com with a few college friends. “It was Foursquare before Foursquare existed,” he explains. “It looked like we were going to change the world until it totally fizzled out.” Moving to Los Angeles with his then-girlfriend now-wife to “lick his wounds,” he attended a development meeting with his dad for the Montage Beverly Hills in 2006. “I had only known hospitality through operations, but never thought about development or what it took to build and program a hotel—and create the culture,” he remembers. “I was blown away and fell in love with it.” He went and knocked on the door of the developer, the Athens Group, and begged for a job, offering to work for free or get coffee. “I just wanted to be around it and learn,” he says.
He spent almost three years there—first as an intern, then as a project manager—before joining his dad in 2009 as a residential sales associate for Montage Beverly Hills, eventually becoming Montage’s director of acquisitions and development. Soon, he and his dad realized there was a gap in the market. “Luxury has changed a lot in the last 15 years and there’s a new luxury guest who is well-traveled, has lived through the recession, has grown up around luxury with their parents, is tied in culturally to what’s relevant now, and has stayed at luxury hotels all over the world, but maybe some of those aren’t as interesting from a programming or design standpoint,” he says. “Like we did 15 years ago, where we were ahead of the curve and crafted this idea for Montage of comfortable luxury, we wanted to take the best of what we do as a luxury hospitality company—great service, culture, quality—and marry it with a bolder design for a slightly younger, still very luxury guest.”
New Legacy
Pendry launched in 2014 (Fuerstman started working on the brand in 2013 and transitioned fulltime to it in 2015), and the first hotel—a new build—is set to open this month on almost a full city block (mostly a former parking lot) in downtown San Diego. “We are a SoCal company, it’s not far from our home, we love the market, and we couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a better product downtown for our guests,” he says.
With a blank canvas, local firm ACRM Architects + Interiors created a smaller brick, steel, and glass building with a 12-story tower set behind it in hopes of crafting the look of an assemblage of multiple properties that have been acquired over time. It matches the “classically beautiful palette” inside by Rottet Studio (handling the lobby and its bar, the 317 guestrooms, an expansive pool deck, meeting space, and the spa) and Studio Munge in Toronto (responsible for three of the F&B venues), says Fuerstman. Think stone, tile, wood, steel, and brass paired with bold layering and contemporary furniture pieces. “We wanted to pay homage to where we are in San Diego—so coastal California, but also the Gaslamp Quarter. It’s nautical and industrial.”
Programming was also essential as Fuerstman wanted to celebrate San Diego’s burgeoning food, nightlife, and beer scene. Six F&B spaces seamlessly flow into each other, yet have their own distinct feel. There’s LA transplant Provisional, a community dining room-coffee shop-retail space hybrid set beneath a greenhouse, a collaboration with Raan and Lindsay Parton of Alchemy Works in LA; German-style beer hall Nason’s; Fifth & Rose lobby bar; and three venues from veteran operator (and San Diego local) Andy Masi of Clique Hospitality—signature seafood restaurant Lionfish, basement craft cocktail joint Oxford Social Club, and indoor-outdoor Pool House. “It’s a big hotel, but we took a lot of pain and time to make it feel intimate and then stacked all of the entertainment spaces on the exterior of the hotel so they are integrated into the city. It feels like you are in somebody’s great home.”
On the Horizon
Opening on the heels of San Diego in March is Sagamore Pendry Baltimore. Under Armour founder Kevin Plank approached Fuerstman to make Pendry the anchor of his transformation of the vacant Recreation Pier in Fells Point. Unlike San Diego, the three-story 128-room hotel—with architecture by BHC Architects in Baltimore and interiors courtesy of local residential designer Patrick Sutton—is a renovation of a historic circa-1914 building, once home to the city’s immigration center. Drawing upon its location and history, guestrooms boast a masculine feel with rich wood mixed with touches of brass and leather.
Standout F&B is just as important at this location, and Fuerstman is collaborating with chef Andrew Carmellini’s NoHo Hospitality for Rec Pier Chophouse and whiskey bar the Cannon Room. There will also be a pool with a waterfront bar and grill, a spa, a sculpture-infused courtyard, a private dock, and 10,000-square-feet of indoor-outdoor event space, including a restored ballroom. “It’s a smaller experience but every bit as memorable,” Fuerstman says.
On the horizon: a “mega” Martin Brudnizki-designed West Hollywood location on the former House of Blues site with 149 rooms plus residential units; and hopefully more hotels in New York, Miami, and other key markets. “There are more opportunities for Pendry Hotels out in the world than there are Montages,” he says, adding that considering the industry’s recent onslaught of consolidations, “it’s better for a group like us that’s smaller and more nimble—we do less projects but try to do them better.”
For Fuerstman and his dad, this has been more than a career. “It has always felt like we’re building something really awesome together—one plus one equals three. I give him a lot of credit for that,” he says of their strong relationship. “I’m proud of the way he can balance having a great family, travel 180 days a year, which I do now as well, have hobbies, and work his ass off and love what he’s doing. It’s cool.”
