For Ashley Stempler, success is “waking up excited to dive into the next beautiful disaster,” she says. This fearlessness and drive is the cornerstone of her personality. It started when she was child growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, where she was always sketching and painting, crediting her grandmother, a decorator, with having a meaningful influence on her life.
After earning an undergraduate degree in fine art and art history, Stempler went on to earn her master’s in interior architecture from Drexel University in Philadelphia, where study abroad experiences cemented her status as a “hospitality junkie and travel addict,” she says. Her first design internship with Granary Associates (now Stantec) in Philadelphia showed her what it meant “to live and breath specs, materials, and drawings.”
After she graduated in 2009, Stempler made the bold decision to break her lease, sell her furniture and car, and move to Hong Kong. But the recession hit soon after, and she lost her job at Design Worldwide Partnership. It was a defining “go big or go home” moment that led her to stay and take a position at HBA. Although she calls this time period her “dog years, in terms of how much I experienced in such a short period,” it ultimately prepared her for her biggest role to date: director of design at Portland, Oregon-based hotel operator Provenance Hotels.
Today, she oversees the design direction of Provenance’s portfolio of lifestyle properties, including the recently opened Woodlark in Portland and Lora in Stillwater, Minnesota. On the boards is an adaptive reuse project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and a ground-up development in Hermosa Beach, California. A new-build, 125-room boutique hotel with Vera Bradley founder Barbara Bradley Baekgaard in Fort Wayne, Indiana (where Baekgaard started the luggage and handbag design company) and a design from New York firm Dutch East Design is a leap forward for Provenance. “Together, we are creating something transformative for the city,” says Stempler.
Still, the New York-based designer says she’s motivated by “those endless days when everyone is around a table to solve whatever disaster is at hand, knowing no one is leaving until it is mastered. It’s the ultimate high.”
