Illuminating a profound dialogue between hospitality and contemporary art is 21c Museum Hotels, the Louisville, Kentucky-based company founded in 2006 by husband-and-wife team Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown. The brand’s collection of eight properties, found in Louisville; Nashville; Oklahoma City; Cincinnati; Kansas City; Durham, North Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; and Bentonville, Arkansas (Chicago and Des Moines, Iowa are under construction) were all designed by New York firm Deborah Berke Partners. Wilson introduced attendees to his one-of-a-kind hotels, explaining a vision devoted to the transformation of local communities.
Cultivating a lifestyle
21c Museum Hotels was an organic outgrowth of Wilson and Brown’s personal passions: a love of the land and contemporary art. “It began with our own lifestyle at home,” he says. Despite rotting chimneys and a missing front porch that had been neglected for 13 years, the couple felt it was their mission to rescue the circa-1830s house located on a 1,000-acre Kentucky farm. They moved in, started raising bison, and dressed the oversized walls of their revamped home with the artworks they relished. Their exhibition-worthy collection of pieces began to grow, and soon, museums were bringing people by the busload to take a look. But Wilson and Brown had a better, albeit “crazy” idea to share these pieces with a curious public: open a hotel.
Downtown devotion
Wilson and Brown were adamant that their hotel open in downtown Louisville. They wanted to help make “inner cities more liveable and enjoyable,” and created the first 21c by stitching together five vacant warehouses. After the success of Louisville, other cities like Cincinnati beckoned, and Wilson and Brown expanded. Except for the Bentonville property, which was built on an empty lot in the center of the city, all the hotels are housed in historic buildings.
Stress breeds creativity
As a child, Wilson shunned corn fields and farm duties by pretending he was the ringmaster of a circus where “everything inside would be beautiful and happy. That long-held desire to entertain and bring happiness to the world” fuels 21c, he says. Wilson, whose background is in public relations, admits that he and Brown had zero hotel training and no idea what they were doing, but “it’s easy to break all the rules if you never knew what the rules were.”
Photography by Magnus Lindquist and courtesy of 21c Museum Hotels
