Aaron Richter, Equinox Brands

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Aaron Richter of Equinox. Aaron, thanks so much for joining us today.

Aaron Richter: Good afternoon.

SSR: So let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

AR: I grew up north of Boston. I’m what’s affectionately known as a Masshole, which means really three things. It means you drive too fast. You fight sooner than you should, and if I like you, I make fun of you.

SSR: Kind of love that. Was design always in your blood or part of your growing up at all?

AR: I come from a family of artists. So I’ve been fortunate that I was the only one who could draw a straight line, which means I was the architect. Art was all around us. We were fighting over markers. My mother would let me build forts out of sheets and chairs and let me keep them up for days at a time, which I think was my first introduction to architecture.

SSR: Okay, cool. Did you travel a lot as well?

AR: Actually, no. I didn’t travel much at all. Maybe one Colorado trip when I was very young. My first real travel was after I got to Nike and my first job was a shop in Guam.

SSR: Well, before we get the Nike, did you go to school for architecture then? Was that a path that you just continued on?

AR: You have to apply to architecture programs and I went to school for architecture at Roger Williams University and got a bachelor of architecture.

SSR: Was it everything you thought it was or harder?

AR: I think it was because I think during the education of architecture you are taught the poetry of it, less so the business aspects of it. So I think I was satisfied from the sort of artistic endeavor and probably undereducated from the business endeavor.

SSR: Was Nike your first job out of college? Or was there something in between?

AR: Nike was my first job out of college. I actually was waiting for my graduate acceptance letters to come in and I was wait listed at the [Harvard Graduate School of Design] and to make money for that, I went to get an internship at Nike in Beaverton, Oregon.

SSR: It’s kind of a dream job for most designers and architects. What was your role there? I know you started off as an intern, but what were you doing there and was it everything that everyone makes it out to be?

AR: So even then it was a thing. I think now, obviously, it’s become its own culture. I was an intern, I had a week to decide whether to be a footwear designer or an architect for Nike as I had a footwear portfolio and an architectural portfolio. I got in right away doing NikeTowns. Again I mentioned the shop in Guam, shop-in-shops, duty free shops, fixture programs, and then culminating with the Nike Towns.

SSR: What were some of the greatest lessons you learned there or things about retail that you’ve taken on the rest of your career?

AR: You get very spoiled at Nike because your team is not staffed with your typical staff members on the team. You are partnered as a creative with copywriters and visual merchandisers. Other professions that you don’t know very much about as an architect and don’t really validate much as an architect. And what was nice is to break down all those walls and understand projects from a variety of different standpoints.

SSR: Is there one project that you worked on that stands out in your mind still?

AR: I mean I like the NikeTowns. I think back when we were doing NikeTowns, no one was doing anything like that, which I’m very proud about that. But I think the job that really stood out was my very first job. I was given a project called the mobile events retail platform. And essentially that was a 15 foot by 15 foot tent. And they said, ‘This is your first job and we want you to design the new tent.’ And I went off and thought that was really lame. And so instead of designing a tent, I went and sourced the largest legal Mack Truck you could put on the road and propose that we kit one out and completely customize it, for a mobile retail venue.

SSR: When did you decide to leave or move?

AR: So I was fascinated with the GSD. I always wanted to go to the GSD so, I actually reapplied to the GSD two years into my internship at Nike after I redrew my entire portfolio, I was wait listed a second time at the GSD and ultimately not accepted. So after that had culminated, I realized I wanted to get my registration as an architect. I needed to practice architecture in the traditional sense and that’s when I moved back to New York.

SSR: So did you come back to New York with a job or did you come here and then find one out?

AR: No I got recruited. I often get recruited and I got recruited while I was at Nike to get an architectural job at Pompei A.D [now Pompei C3], which is a retail design firm downtown with Ron Pompei.

SSR: Interesting. So what did you do for them? What kind of projects were you working on?

AR: So that was interesting, we were doing Anthropologies at the time, which is probably the exact aesthetic opposite of Nike, which was a nice way to make sure I was had a deeper aesthetic canon. And I think what was cool about that kind of thing is you’d be going and finding used mantle pieces and flooring from old recovered schools in Wisconsin. It was a much different experience than Nike.

SSR: What was it like working on retail stores when retail was thriving?

AR: I mean it was funny that everyone at Nike knew that the location in Midtown lost money. It wasn’t there to make money. That wasn’t the point. The point was that it was a billboard, it was a sort of celebration of the brand, a way to immerse yourself in the brand. And I think being immersed in the brand, especially in that one NikeTown was all about, the screens would drop down. You would be in a world of flying shoe tubes and you would experience the design of the shoes. We bring the design forward, so you’d show sketches, you would show models. It was messy on purpose. It was a way to really make you feel like you’re part of the company. And that was again brave, I think at the time.

SSR: And what was Pompei like to work at?

AR: Ron was ahead of his time. I got to hand it to him. He was thinking about retail like Ikea thinks about retail today and where you go in and you don’t shop all of the medium dresses, you go and you experience this vignette of an experience or a moment. So the retail would be set up around, here’s what your sort of a reclaimed apothecary could look like in your kitchen, and all of the things associated with that rather than a different boring categorization of products.

SSR: And then you got recruited again?

AR: I did. Well actually I did. I got recruited again to Sight Design. So I was a vice president of design at Site Design, a very small firm. And we oversaw the development of the retail platform for Victorinox, which is the Swiss Army brands out of Switzerland. So we worked on all their physical presence.

SSR: So how long did you say at Site then?

AR: So I was at Sight for two years, almost to the day. And I had two very horrible things happened to me. It happened to a lot of people, I had 9/11, which I was downtown for and then my mother passed about a month after that. And so I didn’t really want to work at all after that. I didn’t really want to be in the city and I got as far away as from New York as I could. I moved to Japan for a couple of months and sort of walked around. And when I came back from Japan. I got it again. And I got a random phone call from a head hunter who said, ‘Do you want to do hotel work?’ And I said, I was a retail guy. I don’t really know hotels. And her reaction was great. That’s what they’re looking for. And I met with Barry.

SSR: Barry Sternlicht

AR: Barry Sternlicht. Yes.

SSR: And this was at the beginning of the W brand?

AR: Yeah, they had opened 49th and Lex at the time. But I think they were just kind of just getting into the groove of what they wanted to be, what they could be. Westin was doing well with a heavenly bed. At the time we really wanted to differentiate what the W brand was between the Westin brand. That was an issue for a little while in terms of the markets they were going into.

SSR: And what was it like creating this brand that changed the industry from what it was?

AR: It was a blast. What was really fun about Starwood and Barry, in particular, is he has the confidence and he has the intelligence to sort of navigate a very complex industry and say, ‘This is what we think is important now, and I’m going to give you permission to do it.’ Barry’s a real believer and has always been a believer in design shaping experience. And I think as architects we all sort of embrace that. He embraced it and could put money behind it and strategy behind it. I was one of the ones who introduced him into a lot of design firms that he probably didn’t know about and he was very receptive to that. And he got into a pace where he would find the design firms and show him to me, and we would go back and forth.

It was a very fun time and what was really interesting about the whole process is that he would often not want to look at designers who had done hotels before, and he was keen on doing that for a fresh perspective, and he was comfortable in a weird way and very, again, brave, letting go of that assurance of saying, here we’re going to use the same designer again and again and again because they’ve done the last five hotels. Nothing new is coming from that. And that’s sort of why he dipped into the retail industry to look for design talent.

SSR: It must have taught you a lot at the same time since you hadn’t done many hotels before this.

AR: Well I didn’t know anything about carpets, I’ll tell you that. I didn’t know anything about rub tests and fire-retardant and fabrics. I had no clue. I literally had no clue. He was definitely drinking from the fire hose. I had a lot of help early on. I was very fortunate to be having some great employees that worked hard and were as passionate as I was. That went a long way.

SSR: And was there one project back then that still sticks in your mind or was a true challenge or you think kind of summed up where the brand was or should be?

AR: Probably two projects that are critical for my development and probably critical for the W brand. I think the first one with W was South Beach. South Beach was one that was being developed with RFR on a very normal track. It was double order corridor. It was straight down the middle. It wasn’t brave at all.

And I think I was able to convince David Edelstein and Michael Fuchs, who are the financial guys behind that project to hire another architect midstream and develop another concept at the same time. And that was with the Costas Kondylis and Yabu Pushelberg. Yabu had done a couple of hotels but they hadn’t done a significant hotel or a hotel of note at the time. And so it was a little bit risky hiring Yabu; it was certainly risky hiring Costas Kondylis. And we worked for about three months in parallel with the other team. And at the end, we realized that where I was taking it was way more interesting. And we quickly kept on a couple of the architects to get through the city. But we pushed that to a place that I don’t think South Beach had seen. I think it was pretty defining for the brand. It was ambitious, and I think it’s still ambitious.

SSR: And it’s held up over the test of time?

AR: For sure. I think it’s still one of the rate leaders in South Beach, which just blows my mind. And oddly enough is Ron Wackrow, who is the head of development for hotels for Related and who we work with now at Equinox. And he was of course overseeing the W Union Square, and he was the development guy on South Beach and all roads lead back to each other.

SSR: There was a second project you mentioned, you said one of two.

AR: W Maldives. So we work with a family called Universal is the name of the company, and it’s a family-owned business in the Maldives. You have nothing but an Island. And so the brief there is what does the brand mean in a resort environment? So you had to ask every question. So what’s important for who’s going there, what are they looking for? And I think what we did is we delivered a pretty thoughtful product there really early. I mean we were in Maldives before a lot of people are in the Maldives. I think One&Only might have had a product there at the time, which was excellent by Jean-Michel Gathy. But our project was the first kind of modern take on a Maldivian way of having a resort, which was, how do you deal with the local architecture? How do you deal with the local climate? How do you deal with privacy on a very small island and how do you mix up the experiences on a very small island? So, I think we did all of those things pretty well.

SSR: Are there any takeaways that you have from Barry himself?

AR: He demands excellence. He doesn’t have patience for a lot of half efforts. He wants to get what’s possible out of you, not what’s just probable. He’s an inspiration. He’s always the smartest guy in the room. No doubt. He’s always the smartest. And it doesn’t matter what the silo of education is. He knows more than you do. He’s constantly absorbing information. So it just makes him a very effective guy. And on top of him being just generally a good human being, I think he’s just really savvy when it comes to that stuff.

SSR: What made you decide to leave building this brand?

AR: It was tricky. My last year at W, I was doing all the international development for W. At the time in the States, we were working on secondary markets and tertiary markets. We were looking at the third deal in Atlanta, no offense to Atlanta, Minneapolis, no offense, Minneapolis. Those are good markets. But we were also simultaneously developing Paris and Hong Kong and the Middle East properties. And at the time they weren’t getting as much attention. So I was doing all of them, and it was crazy. I was single, I could abuse myself fine. But it just got to a point where I couldn’t give enough attention to the projects that were more high profile. And so the last year I went to Belgium and was stationed out of the European offices there and did all the international development out there. And then gave back North and South America to, at the time, I think it was Doug Rico. And so while I was at W, Barry left. He resigned as chairman at Starwood and took up Starwood Capital and started more new brands and started his own thing.

He called me after his non-compete expired, I think the day or the day after his non-compete expired, he said, ‘Okay, it’s time to come and do the 1 Hotel, and we have this new concept, we’re going to launch and you need to do this. You’re the guy. Come.’ It was great. So we started talking about contracts and whatnot. And as we were talking about contracts, I got a cold call from [Ian] Schrager who I had never met and didn’t know anything about. I know of him. Schrager’s a tremendously charming guy. And I had a hot bidding war for a moment there in my life, where Ian was saying, we’re going to launch the Edition. And Barry was saying, we’re going to launch the 1. And I had to decide which one to go to, and ultimately, Ian won out that negotiation and I went with him for a while.

SSR: It’s not everyday that you have to industry visionaries saddling it out, right?

AR: It’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Don’t fight boys. All right.

SSR: So you go over to Ian. Have you launched any Editions yet?

AR: No, they were still in the ideation phase. They were in the process of getting through Levent, which is in Northern Istanbul, which I think is deflagged now. And they were also in the process of finalizing the terms around Waikiki, which I think is also deflagged now and for various reasons. These were early days, what is the brand? What are we trying to produce in the world? And I think Ian was early on trying to figure out how to take high design or really thoughtful and tasteful design on a larger scale. I think one of his frustrations is that his product doesn’t get out to more people than it could. And the Edition was an opportunity for him to do that. So early on, we were what are the brand standards? How big are these things? What do they look like? How do they flow? That was early on stuff. And I think now they’ve gotten to a point where they’re opening many doors a year now because I think they’ve got the philosophy down, it feels like it’s down now.

SSR: Were you ever there to see one through?

AR: No. I didn’t even make it. I looked at a model room at Waikiki and that was about it. And I worked on the spa a little bit in Istanbul and I worked on a number of them that never came to fruition. Some that are still under development.

SSR: That’s kind of amazing that looking back all these years there are still some hotels under development. What was Ian like?

AR: Ian’s intense. If Barry’s passionate times 10, Ian’s passionate times 100.He’s a really smart guy, but I think he leads with his heart in a weird way, where Barry leads with his gut. I think Ian believes in what he’s doing, he really does believe in what he’s doing. I think he generally understands the value in creating something new. And he’s a master at the scene that happens around the creation of the new, and if you look at what he did at the Edition opening in West Hollywood recently. He’s been doing this for years. He’s created magic again and again and again. What I learned from him is that you don’t take A-minus work for anything. It’s always A work. You have to have A work and surround yourself with people will want to do the same.

SSR: Why did you decide to leave all that?

AR: That type of environment works for some people and it doesn’t work for others. I think for me, I had just married, brand-new kid. I don’t feel like I could devote my entire life to an office at the time. I still wanted balance then and I love the brand and I still love the brand. I still think they do a great job. I was being recruited again while I was at Ian’s office by [Harvey] Spevak [chairman and CEO of Equinox], and I was really arms length with Spevak. I said, ‘I just got here. I just moved from Belgium back here. It makes no sense. I can’t just jump ship right now. It doesn’t make any sense.’

But he was insistent and consistently trying to get me and was saying interesting things. At the time, it was very obvious that the boutique hotel industry was very crowded and it’s still crowded in terms of brand differentiation and who’s doing what. And it all started looking very similar, even then. And Harvey was saying, ‘Look, we’re going to do this sort of fitness concept and hospitality.’ And for me that was very, very interesting and it really caught my attention as sort of a something that could be new. And that was 11 years ago now.

SSR: Talk to us about how at first you thought you’re not selling out, but your friends thought you were selling out.

AR: Oh my God. Yeah. Everyone made fun of me. They were like, what are you doing? Because in the hotel industry you couldn’t be cooler, Ian was the coolest you could be. That was the pinnacle of being cool, is working for Ian in the hospitality industry. And my friends were quick to remind me of that. They’re like, ‘What are you doing going to a gym?’ They were like disgusted, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, no, I’m onto something here.’ I knew it then and I like to think I was right, is that there was an opportunity to take an industry that was really neglected. Equinox was design savvy then, to the abilities of what they could do. But no one was doing what we’re doing now in terms of just associate in luxury and wellness, even though we don’t like that word, but luxury and fitness together and blending that into a real lifestyle. I think we saw it then, and we definitely see it now.

SSR: Yes. Can we come up with a new word for wellness.

AR: We’re working on it. Everyone hates it. I don’t know. Goodness, I don’t know. Something else.

SSR: Something good.

AR: Yeah, I’m not sure.

SSR: Okay, so, you go over to Equinox and there was always the intent to go into hotels. It wasn’t really out there yet. Was that the behind the scenes?

AR: Yeah. We didn’t announce it. We had three hotel deals on the books when I got there, and I was going to do the hotels and the clubs when I got there because it was going to be one thing. And then the recession hit and everything went belly up and money was put on the side, projects were mothballed and we ended up just working on club design, which for me was a little unexpected but very, very rewarding unexpectedly.

SSR: Well for some reason fitness seems to stand the test of time.

AR: It’s a pendulum. I remember jogging was a thing and then it wasn’t a thing and CrossFit’s a thing and it’s not a thing. We like to think that taking care of yourself is important and hopefully people continue to take care of themselves. We understand the benefits of it. So hopefully that will continue.

SSR: Well, even more so now. What do you think of the wellness industry or fitness industry from when you started to now?

AR: There’s a lot more studios. There’s a lot more product out there. That’s positive for everybody. We’re not mad about that at all. I think we’re happy that people are working out, people are taking care of themselves. So this is valuable for everybody. It has a knock on effect where not just the person working out benefits, but the people around them benefit as well.

SSR: So you started designing clubs. What were you trying to do with the clubs? Were you bringing retail? Were you’re bringing hospitality? Were you bring a little bit of both?

AR: It’s funny. Harvey had the same question for me, the head hunter asked, he said, ‘Do you have any experience doing health clubs?’ And my answer was no. And then he said, ‘Awesome. That’s great. That’s what we’re looking for.’ Twice I’ve been asked that, I’m always giving the right answer: ‘I don’t know a thing.’ I think early on, I had to tour all the properties with him. He does this January tour. He still does, he’s on it right now. He tours every property in January regardless how many properties we have. Every year it’s more difficult clearly. And so I did the property tours with him and saw all the portfolio and he could talk through what was working and what didn’t work and what members liked and what members didn’t like. And he kind of walked me through his perspective of the physical plant.

And of course my brain just goes and I’m like, well what if we do this? Or what if we expanded this? What if we rebranded that piece of it? What if we blurred these two pieces of program? What if we introduced this program? And I would constantly push and test and, push and test. And for the first three years I could get away with a little, I had to get a couple of good projects under my belt before he would trust me to do something.

One of the first ones was this idea of socialization in the club and a lounge in the club, which no one had done that. It wouldn’t make any sense. And we had done one in Kensington, in London, and we had to design it so I could fill the wall back in. To his point that you wouldn’t know that we had made a mistake and just swear. So it’s literally, like a hole in the wall that we could fill back in. And so I was like, all right, well, I will personally fill that wall back in if it fails. And of course it didn’t fail. It did very, very well. And I think that spawned this whole idea that people could get together in these spaces of like minds and have a better experience.

SSR: Almost like a community?

AR: We already had the community, the community’s there and they just needed a place to sit down and talk to each other and hang out and have a tea and meet with a trainer and do all these things that exists. We had one renovation property, and it was a 140,000-square-foot thing and we had a tour late, late at night to do the scope. And we got there 11 o’clock right when the club was closing and we noticed there were 20 people waiting on the curb for their Porsches or whatever they’re waiting for and they’re trying to have a scene on the sidewalk. And I felt like I had failed them and I was like, I failed you people. I’m so sorry. And so we renovated a club. And a big part of that renovation of the club was developing social spaces and the ground floor, so they don’t wait on the sidewalk anymore. They wait inside. I’m very proud to say and, but that was the first initial moment where we started doing it in a real way. And that’s just grew and grew and grew.

SSR: So when did the hotels come back online as an option?

AR: So about four years ago now. So we started doing the ideation about four years ago. A small group of us, Harvey, myself, David Gutstadt, who you probably know from Fitler club down in Philly. And it was really just a small group of us brainstorming for months. We’d go on these offsites and we’d sketch and we yell at each other and we’d come up with ideas, and we’d throw them out and we’d start over again. We generated a lot of conceptual work during that process, and I think we probably executed maybe 10 percent of it, which is amazing to me because I think even the 10 percent feels innovative where the 90 percent probably was pretty radical, and we’re going to get at it eventually we’re chipping away at it.

SSR: So for those who haven’t seen the Trice Equinox at Hudson Yards in New York, what are the pillars of the brand that you translated into the hotel and then what kind of experience? Because I don’t think people would guess the type of experience that the hotel is. I think it surprises people in a way.

AR: Hopefully there’s a couple of different layers of that surprise. The first thing you might, that might strike people as is that it’s a luxury offering. I think that probably might be a head scratcher to some and I don’t think we’ll always be a 5-Star product. I don’t think that’s the intent. I think Hudson Yards wanted to be and had to be because of its location. But if you put that aside for a second and say, well, okay, it’s a luxury star rating or whatever the hell, then we more look at, what’s the offering and the offering for us is really governed around the three big categories, which we call movement, nutrition and regeneration. And the movement part of that is we’ve had for a long time, it’s fitness classes, it’s training, it’s pilates, you name it. We’re movement, movement, movement. We’re good, good, good.

And nutrition, we’ve been touching go and we’re getting better nutrition. Stars would help a lot in that category. But regeneration, we’re one of the largest spa operators in the United States. A lot of people don’t know that. Because of how many rooms we have and so regeneration is a massive part of wellness, goodness, whatever we’re calling it now. And so we wanted to really drill down on the restoration portion of that puzzle. And that really meant sleep. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about sleep. And I think what’s surprising to a lot of people is the money that we spend in that property, often you don’t see. Often, it’s specifically an acoustically isolated experience. It’s one of the quietest rooms, if not the quietest room in the industry.

And that’s without putting anything on the wall. Without wall covering, carpeting, good furniture, none of that matters. It’s how do you make a quiet experience because audio pollution and visual pollution are the worst things for your sleep and while going to bed with an iPad, watching TV in bed, light pollution from the doors, sound pollution from a neighbor or a neighboring room. That all interrupts your REM cycle, which just basically has a detrimental effect on your recovery. So if we can attack each one of those items and really just focus that the room could be purple, wouldn’t matter. We want to deliver that. And I think that’s what surprises people is that that’s what the offerings about.

That’s why you’ll find meditation in the room. That’s how you find restorative yoga programming in the room. That’s why the rooms can be completely blacked out, so all those are key points for the importance of the room. And then the other surprising part is that we’re always associated with a significant fitness offering. And in Hudson Yards, it’s rather grand; 60,000 square feet are our largest ever purpose-built facility. And to have that an elevator ride away is impressive. It’s unexpected. And what’s cool about it is it’s a neighborhood business, so you go down as a transient guest and you’re not in the empty unstaffed hotel gym, which is creepy at times. You’re in a vibrant neighborhood, a community. And that for us is a win.

SSR: And I think too about in the room, I mean, I think the OS&E and how you guys thought about every little aspect of it was really, truly impressive.

AR: Thank you. One of my people in Equinox, Bethany Zaheer has been fantastic at helping in that project. We thought of every single moment through the lens of what does it mean for the brand? Like everyone, we didn’t like the fucking umbrellas, the slippers, the sanitary wrap around the yoga mat. Like every little thing, the charcoal-infused sleep masks, everything’s thought through this process and this filter. And interestingly that makes the decisions  in a weird way easy to make because if it doesn’t match these criteria, it’s not important.

SSR: I think that comes through in the materials, right. They’re all very real.

AR: I mean the materials are important in the sense that, what you’ll notice about the rooms, and this is replicable, is that the room bay width, and this is has to happen in the planning stages, is wide enough for you to get a rollout yoga mat on a hardwood floor, which sounds like a simple thing but it’s not. Hotel room proportions are not designed this way. They don’t take this into account and often you have to fight with the developer to get that done, but we believe that’s a very important thing. Hardwood floor, yoga mat, and ability to do that kind of work. Then you sort of think about, well the materials have to be durable. Certainly they have to be hospitality grade, they have to survive a hospitality environment and we try to give it a residential bent. That’s what we do in the clubs as well. And I think they have to be a sophisticated palette. I think they have to be at a palette that that crowd is expecting.

SSR:  So what was it like collaborating with the various designers? Because the one thing that’s interesting, so you worked with SOM, Rockwell Group, and Joyce Wang on the spa and the fitness. And I think what’s interesting is between Rockwell and Joyce, there’s a very clear language that they kept. The spaces seem like they’re almost designed by the same person, but they weren’t and they’re probably not done so interconnectedly as it might’ve seen.

AR: That’s kind of my responsibility is making sure that we see that the designs have to be sisters and which means, they’re not the same by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re related. They need to have a some commonality, some thread of brand ethos that comes out. And that’s up to me to govern that. Joyce has a very specific and very, very, very sophisticated look. And Rockwell’s got their thing and Charles’ has his thing and that can be tricky of convincing designers that they need to look at their work through a new lens can be tricky, but for them often very rewarding.

SSR: Okay. So Hudson New York has opened. Everyone took a deep breath. What’s next?

AR: Take a break. Shot of tequila.

SSR: What’s next? What can you share about the brand and maybe some things that you’ve learned that you guys are evolving or tweaking along the way.

AR: So the next monumental one is in downtown Los Angeles, which is the Grand Ave project with Related. So that’s with Frank Gehry, Frank Gehry’s the architect on that one. And we’re working with Tara Bernerd on the interiors who’s out of the UK. That’s heroic. And it’s heroic in the sense that there is a fitness facility with that. But there’s also this massive outdoor area that I think Los Angeles has never seen before. So we’re excited about what’s going on with that one. We’re carrying over the same philosophy that we are from New York. We’re mimicking the same acoustics, we’re mimicking some shower experiences. We’re taking the best of New York and then we’re sort of upgrading and tweaking it for the Los Angeles market. So the design will not look at all like New York and won’t even, the room won’t even function like New York. It’s its own thing, but the fundamentals are there.

SSR: And what’s the plan after that?

AR: After LA we’ve announced a project in Santa Clara, a rather large thing in Santa Clara. We are working on Chicago in the West Loop. That’s a property that tower by Roger Ferris, and we’ll be working with Roman and Williams on the interiors on that, which is very exciting. Those were fun. Those are announced and then after that it’s a litany of developing pursuits that may pop or may not at any given moment, but the interest has been strong from the development community, so we’ve been very fortunate.

SSR: Have you always been a fitness buff or has this been somewhat of learning curve for you?

AR: Jacked my whole life. No, I had to learn. I came to fitness late. It’s funny. I started fitness really at Nike and it goes back to my boss, this guy John Hoke, an incredible guy at Nike. I was working at my desk over lunch. I had bought my lunch at my desk, which seemed like a normal thing to do as an architect, you work through lunch and he walked by my desk and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to get ahead.’ And he goes, ‘That’s not how you get ahead.’ He goes, ‘You go for a run, you join the softball team. That’s how you embrace the company.’ So I was like, ‘Wow, okay.’

So I figured I’d start to run, I learned how to jog and run, being a runner. And then I joined the softball team, exactly what he said. And it turns out the softball team was all ex-Seattle Mariners. So, I didn’t really belong there. They were very kind. But that’s when I first started getting into fitness. And then at Equinox, it really solidified the habit. The need for it. And since then I’m kind of hooked.

SSR: Got it. What do you love about the hotel industry all these years and what keeps you going? What gets you up in the morning?

AR: I think what you lose sight of in the design side of it is that you think you’re going to solve all the problems from a design and it’s not really true. The problems are solved person to person. And that’s what’s wonderful about the hospitality industry is you’re only as good as your people. And I say it on the club side a lot. When we open a club, people are complimentary. We’ve opened some nice clubs and people are saying this is incredible. This is incredible. Thank you. And my response is always the same is that this is a set.

We’re set designers, and hospitality is the same thing where they’re set designers. We’re setting a stage for an interaction and if I set a good stage, you might have a good interaction. But my stage, it doesn’t necessarily script the interaction. I want to inspire the people that are working there to have the right interaction, to be proud of the space, to have the right interaction. And that’s the magic. And I think when you see that it doesn’t matter what design looks like, you can find that sort of honest hospitality anywhere. And so that still amazes me.

SSR: Is there something that Hudson Yards taught you that you didn’t realize before?

AR: Oh my god. That there’s a lot of different opinions about what luxury means. There’s a lot of different angles on luxury and this idea that everything is gilded and shiny and linen counts matter. And I don’t think that’s just gone away. I think I like to think it’s gone away. This idea that it’s the picture of luxury, but we don’t look at luxury like that at all. We don’t think about luxury at all. I think Hudson Yards really taught us that what luxury is, is an hour for yourself, is an hour dedicated for yourself that you take for yourself. I mean, you give 18 hours a day to somebody else, you might as well take an hour for yourself. And that’s luxury in New York. You’re crazy. You can’t get a moment with yourself. In the spa, we have nap pods so you can go and take a nap, an hour of the day and take a nap. I think that’s fantastic. So we look at luxury as how do you facilitate that hour for that person? How do you respect and honor that hour for that person.

SSR: Do you think that also relates to, because as much as your luxury, you also have a lifestyle edge to it obviously with Equinox, so how do you think lifestyles also evolved since your W days to today?

AR: I think what people celebrate is different. I had this argument yesterday that what are we celebrating in the room? Is it the alcohol? Is it the television? I don’t know if those are important anymore. I don’t think that’s what the younger generation cares about as much anymore. I think media is very personal for people, so the idea that I’m interacting with the TV content that you prescribed for me, that you pick the movies, it doesn’t exist anymore. And I think what’s valuable for people is not what it used to be. And we’d like to find the new values in what we’re doing.

SSR: Well, I think that’s great place to stop.

AR: Sure.

SSR:Thank you so much for joining us today, Aaron.

AR: Thanks for having me.

SSR: It’s great to catch up.

AR: Pleasure.