Jul 23, 2019

Episode 22

Charlie North, Ennismore

Details

Ennismore’s Charlie North has been leading the hotel developer’s interiors practice since 2015, after cutting his teeth with the likes of the late David Collins, Alexander Waterworth, and Martin Brudnizki. Recently named to our 2019 Wave of the Future class, North is behind the Hoxton’s growth Stateside, as well as helping to spearhead the redo of the posh Gleneagles in Scotland. With each property, he’s creating thoughtful, layered spaces that encourage guests to linger.

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Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: I’m here with Charlie North of Ennismore and the Hoxton. Hi, Charlie. Thanks so much for joining us.

Charlie North: Thanks for having me.

SSR: So, you grew up in the northwest of London, right?

CN: Yeah, a small village, actually, just outside of London. So I was always a 20-minute train journey away, but it was good. It was nice growing up with fields and slightly in the countryside.


SSR: And did you always know you wanted to be a designer? Was design part of your childhood at all?

CN: My mother was a landscape designer when I was a kid, so I always looked at her technical drawings. She used to do these massive sheets with trace paper and a pen and used to scratch out when you make mistakes. And she always had this massive drawing board in the living room. I saw that, and I was inspired by that when I was a kid. It must have stuck with me.

SSR: That’s awesome. Was your dad at all involved in anything creative?

CN: I’ve taken inspiration from both my parents and their careers, but just for very different reasons. My dad was in human resources, and I think just the whole people management, communications, and relationships, and that sort of thing has really affected me as well. I definitely take inspiration from both of their careers.

SSR: And you studied product design at school when you were a teenager.

CN: I did study product design. My product that I designed was a scale model of a restaurant that I designed. And I completely flunked the course because part of design is all about materials, and systems, and processes and production, and mine was just a one-off model of a scheme that I designed. But, hey, got me to where I am now, so.

SSR: Did you ever go back to the teacher and [says], ‘Look, what I do now.’

CN: I never did. I should do that.

SSR: And then did you actually end up going to school for design?

CN: Yeah, I knew at that point I wanted to do interior design, so I went to study on the south coast of England. There’s a university called Bournemouth, and I did a bachelor of arts degree there, which is a four-year course. And, yeah, that was the beginning.

SSR: And did that cement it? Was there ever a question? Sometimes school can either make it good or bad.

CN: There was a time when I was in my career in the early days, I was really passionate about branding and that side of the graphic design as well. And I thought maybe there could be an avenue, but  my director at the time said, ‘Stick to what you’re good at. And if you’re good at it, just work hard and see where it goes.’ So I did.

SSR: That’s awesome. And what was your first job out of school?

CN: I worked for a company called David Collins Studio, which is London based. I started there when I was still at university. I did a yearlong internship, which turned into a fulltime job. He was an iconic designer, still well-known across the globe and doing sort of high-end projects and was an inspiring person to work for.

SSR: Yeah, what did you learn from working with him?

CN: It was a baptism of fire. It was hard work. He was a challenging person to work for, but also really inspiring. You learn how to do things properly and take care and attention to all the details, and you sort of roll with the punches. Yeah, it was great.

SSR: Were there any cool projects that you worked on with him and the team?

CN: I started out working on a residential project, which was a pretty expensive house in West London, and I just learned there how to do details, and how to really pay attention. At that point, I didn’t have much interaction with the clients, which is a good thing. I was just learning how to deal with sites and contractors and everything, so that was great. And then I worked on restaurant spaces within Fortnum & Mason, which is a well-established department store in London.

SSR: Very cool. How long were you there, and what did you do next?

CN: I was at David Collins for, in total, about 18 months. And then I decided to leave to go to South Africa. I did a volunteering program in South Africa for three months. It was my version of a gap year, just a condensed three months to experience something completely different and take me out of my comfort zone. And it was an amazing experience. It was definitely life changing, and it was an amazing time in my life.

SSR: What was the project that you were working on there?

CN: So I worked in a preschool, working with 4 and 5 year olds. You learn, small actions and small things that you give to kids that becomes a huge part of their life. And it’s really an amazing experience to see, just to experience kids as well, because I wasn’t used to that being a 23 year old from London.

SSR: As a mother of three, I can still say you learn something new every single day. That’s amazing. I mean, to take that leap, and just leave a career that was slowly building takes a lot. I mean, was that always something you wanted to do or was it an opportunity that kind of fell into your lap?

CN: I feel like it was sort of an opportunity to have a bit of a break from personal sort of life circumstances, and I just wanted to get away for a little bit. But also I felt that doing 18 months with David Collins, it was a great experience and it was tough, and I was ready to experience something else and work somewhere else.

SSR: Got it. So you come back from South Africa.

CN: Yeah.

SSR: What do you do then?

CN: I hit recession.

SSR: Perfect.

CN: I came back to London just about the worst time possible. And I freelanced for two or three months, just doing random jobs for small design studios in London. Then I got lucky, and I landed a job with Martin Brudnizki Design Studio and that was the next five years of my life, which was another roller coaster ride.

SSR: So going from David Collins to South Africa and then Martin Brudnizki, who is becoming a rising star in this industry at the time, what was that like? What was it like working for him?

CN: It was amazing. The company was 25 when I started, and by the time that I left five years later, it was about 55, and had an office opening up in New York at the same time. For me, it was the first time I got to work with my own clients. So I had that sort of opening. I worked on Cecconi’s in West Hollywood. That was my first chance to learn how to draw in feet and inches, and so getting used to your way of working. I worked on a 5-Star hotel in Saudi Arabia. I worked on commercial property development. And then I had an amazing opportunity with a residential project, which was 18 months working on a Georgian manor house in the west country of England. And it was stunning. It had sort of a pool house, it had tennis courts, a walled garden, orchards, and it was amazing.

SSR: Almost like a small resort.

CN: Yeah, in itself.

SSR: Was there one project that really challenged you, or was there one project that you loved or that you learned the most from while you were with him?

CN: I would say that one, the big residential project. It was the first time that I really ran a project completely alone, and I was doing site visits twice a week and just really having that personal relationship with a client, which was an amazing opportunity. It was tough, really tough, but it was great.

SSR: Was there a takeaway from it? Something that you still kind of keep with you?

CN: How to roll with the punches and not piss off your clients. They were challenging times for sure. But at the end of it, we had a great relationship by the end of the project.

SSR: And so how did you end up switching over to Ennismore?

CN: After Martin’s, I had a four-year stint with a startup company, which was a small firm called Alexander Waterworth Interiors. I was the third in the company, and we built the studio to sort of 15-20 people. And I learned so much through that process of scaling a company from small to midsize, relative to most interior design firms.

But then I got introduced by a mutual contact to Sharan [Pasricha], our CEO, and it was just an amazing opportunity. I just couldn’t say no to. It was always my ambition, from a few years to be a design director for a hospitality company, and international hospitality company. And the way Sharan was going, it was definitely a big opportunity.

SSR: So, real quick, let’s go back to Alexander Waterworth. So you watched Martin Brudnizki grow from 25 to 55. You were there at the beginning of Alexander Waterworth. Was there something you can tell people that are growing a company, or starting a company, kind of a lesson learned that you figured out between the two and what it takes to grow correctly?

CN: I think I’m still figuring that out. I think that you just come across hurdles. But I think that the most important thing actually is finding the right team. And you should take time to get the right people on board. I think if you rush into things, which I have seen in some places I’ve worked, and you just hire anyone, the relationship just isn’t there. You need to be with people that you really trust. You don’t need egos on your team. You need good design synergy and good banter as well, just someone you can have a good relationship with.

SSR: And what kind of projects did you work on at Alexander Waterworth?

CN: We did everything from fish and chip shop restaurants in London to a sort of private residence in central London worth, a crazy £50 million project or something. It was a real mix, and such a great experience. The first project we did was like a [£5,000] design fee, and it was just for a sort of boutique café/deli and it was a loss-making project, but it got us a lot of Instagram followings and it got us likes on social media, so kind of that’s a good way to get yourself out there.

SSR: And how did you know the two partners? Were you friends with them?

CN: We were together at Martin Brudnizki. So the two guys who were the owners of the business, they left independently, actually, and then they decided that they would team up. And then they quickly came to me and said, ‘Do you want to join the team?’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s an opportunity.’ So, yeah.

SSR: So fast forward now back to Sharan. And at what point was Ennismore and the Hoxton at when you joined?

CN: So Sharan had three trading hotels. He had just opened the Hoxton in Amsterdam, and he had just purchased Gleneagles, which is an iconic luxury hotel in Scotland. So really that was it at that point. There was probably a team of maybe 40 people in the main HQ. Sorry, I’m not allowed to say HQ. That’s wrong. Yeah, he has probably a team of about 40 or 50 people in the office when I joined. And we went from there. It was already three or four projects in the pipeline, as far as the Hoxton’s concerned. Sharan already had an ambition to do a budget hotel, which is in the pipeline. It basically just got crazy from that point. And we started opening, we started funding sites in Europe and across America. We very quickly opened Paris. We then just last year we opened Williamsburg [in Brooklyn, New York] and Portland [Oregon]. This year is Chicago. We’re opening Los Angeles and Suffolk in London. So that’s just not stopped from that point.

SSR: And for those that may never have gotten to a Hoxton or seen it in the pages of HD, because we’re big fans, can you tell us a little bit about what the brand stands for and what you guys are trying to create?

CN: When Sharan first started the Hoxton, he just wanted to avoid the piss-off factor. So he wanted to avoid additional costs when you checkout. And he just wanted to avoid all the things about a hotel experience, an old hotel experience, that were wrong and annoying, and to just get rid of that. [He wanted to] keep it really casual and a really nice place to go and chill out. [It has a] residential feeling, you can hang out in the lobby, you don’t get sort of quizzed for being there. It’s supposed to be, as Sharan always calls it, it’s a restaurant and a lobby with rooms, not a hotel with a lobby.

SSR: So Amsterdam was the first one when you joined, and then you’ve been expanding the brand, the one in Williamsburg. So like you did at Martin and Alexander Waterworth, where you grew a team, now you’re growing a brand. What has it been like to grow a brand and be such an integral part of it?

CN: I mean, every team within the company has had to evolve a lot, and we’ve had to learn so much. And we’re still learning. From an interior design perspective, we’ve learned how to build brand standards but still allow for creative freedom. And also from a branding perspective, [we’ve learned] how to scale and how to be relevant to your local community, which is the most important thing for the Hoxton. We’ve learned about the sort of nuances in different cities, and the way the culture effects how people use hotels, as well. For example, in Italy, we’ve learned that the Italians stand for coffee. They go to a coffee shop and they stand at the counter, have an espresso, and three minutes later they’ve left. And that doesn’t really sit with a traditional Hoxton lobby. We design places where people can sit for hours, just drinking tea, drinking coffee, having pastries. In Italy, for example, we just have to approach it in a slightly different way. And that’s just one classic example of mixing with the cultures.

SSR: Right. And have you had to grow your team as well to accommodate all these new properties?

CN: When I joined, my team was three people, including me. So I built a studio of, we’re currently about 20, but the reality is we should probably be 40 with the amount of pipeline projects and the amount of work we have going on, which has been a great experience as well. It’s been three years of steady recruitment. We found some great people. And my team are everything.

SSR: Because you do a lot of the design in-house, right, along with outside designers and other collaborators?

CN: Yeah, we do. We take on as many projects as we can. The reality is we have a limited resource capacity. But also, I think it’s good. We like to work with external design firms because you learn something from working with different people. You can be inspired by other designers’ works, so it’s not something we shy away from.

SSR: How do you go about finding the right collaborators to bring in?

CN: Yeah, I think as hard as it is to recruit team internally, really you’ve got to find a design partner that you can relate to, and you can have a good time with. They understand the brand and the values, and they’ve got great taste.

SSR: Speaking of understanding the brand, you guys have really, as you said, you’re more of a restaurant with a lobby and rooms, so you’re really innovating how people use a lobby. And at the same time, you guys are also looking at coworking and meeting space in different ways. Could you kind of elaborate on what you’re doing?

CN: Yeah, I think it’s always been important that the Hoxton lobby is somewhere that you can go and take your time. You can go anytime of the day. Lots of people have set up and run businesses from the Hoxton lobby. And I think it’s therefore quite a natural evolution for us to build a coworking concept, where it’s an extension of our lobby, essentially. The membership of our coworking is called Working From. So for example, Working From Suffolk and Working From Chicago. So the membership is all based around being an extension of our lobby.

So it starts off just with access to the lobby space within Working From. And it goes up. You can have hot desking, you can rent your own offices, or you can have dedicated desks. The same as all other coworking spaces, but ours is sort of founded around have communal areas where you can just relax and you can work from a couch, you can work from your bed. We’ve actually designed a bed concept, where it feels like you’re really in your living room. You’ve got a TV, you’ve got a couch that you can just sit back on and just take your time.

SSR: That’s really cool. And are these integrated into the hotels, or are they separate spaces, or is it kind of a mixture of both?

CN: They are floors within the hotels. So in Suffolk, we have seven floors of coworking space. And in Chicago, we have two floors. And who knows, maybe they’ll be other sites in the future that are separate buildings. I don’t know.

SSR: And what has the response been?

CN: Yeah, there’s a lot of interest. We only launched two weeks ago, officially. And we don’t have our sites open yet. The sites will open in September this year. September and October. So, yeah, the response has been really great. On social media, we’ve had lots of people seeing and approaching us asking us for memberships and prices, and also just the design community are really just interested in what’s next. And people are interested in what’s next for Ennismore. Because it seems like there’s just a lot of different concepts coming out at the moment.

SSR: So what is next for Ennismore?

CN: Sharan keeps his cards quite close to his chest, for good reason, but I think, I mean, who knows, there’s a lot more Hoxtons to come. We have the budget brand, which is coming soon, and we’re toying with another luxury product at the moment. But, yeah, we’ll see. Time will tell.

SSR: So you’re rethinking lobbies, you’re rethinking coworking space. Why is it important to keep innovating?

CN: There’s so much competition. There’s so many people doing so many amazing things in the hospitality world at the moment, so we have to keep one eye on the future. And Sharan actually set up 23 Lab, which is our innovation lab. So we’ve got a team of people dedicated to just researching the future and not really working on any specific project but just generally on all the projects, what could be possible in the future, and what trends are happening, and what we predict will happen in certain cities and countries in the next two or three years.

Because at the end of the day, when you’re designing a hotel, you’re designing it now, and some of our properties don’t open for 18, 24 months, maybe even three years, o we’ve really got to be thinking ahead of the game.

SSR: It’s really interesting. Is there anything that you can pinpoint that you guys are looking at right now?

CN: I mean, there’s a huge push on sustainable design, which there has been for years. So now is a great time, and there are great opportunities for us to think about how restaurants can be sustainable, not just from a design perspective but from the food. Food waste is a huge thing. [There are] endless opportunities, [and] lots of things coming up.

SSR: Have you guys looked at not only sustainability but also wellness? Is that something that is of importance?

CN: Yeah, there’s a huge factor. Certainly for Gleneagles we’re looking at the wellness concept at the moment. And for a new project which is sort of pipeline at the moment, which I can’t say too much about. But wellness is a huge element of it, and how people use spas and gyms. And at the end of the day, a lot of the people that use the Hoxton hotel are business travelers. And when people travel for work these days, they like to stay fit at the same time. And I think people travel so much these days that they need to stay active and healthy, and work can’t get in the way of that. So [we want to] make an environment at the hotel where they’re encouraged to be fit and healthy and active. And that’s got to be a positive.

SSR: In the innovation lab, do they come and do presentations, or are they just gathering info? How does that infiltrate the rest of the team?

CN: They organize talks for everyone to attend in the business. They go off and do research in different cities that we might be working in. And they give presentations to us and then we get the feedback to them as well. So it’s collaborative working, that’s the intention.

SSR: And do you guys get feedback on your designs and your hotels? How much does that take into effect of what you do next?

CN: We get a lot of feedback. And actually we’re just starting a concept where we have a test room in one of our existing properties, where we get to try out new things. And 23 Lab are actually introducing new things that we can try out in the hotel. So guests can actually directly feedback to us. They’re asked to feedback to us and tell us how successful our ideas are. I think you’ve got to listen to your guests at the end of the day. You have to listen to feedback.

SSR: Speaking of luxury, can we touch a little bit on Gleneagles, since that was such an iconic redo? Can you tell us a little about that and how you guys went through the process?

CN: Yeah, Sharan had just purchased Gleneagles when I joined the business, and he needed someone with a mixture of experiences to oversee design for different types of projects. Gleneagles was an amazing opportunity. When I first went, you hear  a lot of hype about it, because it’s so iconic, and that was the early 1920s when the building opened, and it’s got such a history and such a story. But I was slightly disappointed by the interior design when I went there at first, because it really had been a bit run down; it hadn’t been looked after. And we had an amazing opportunity. We partnered with some great design firms and, at that point I had a team of three, like I said, so we partnered with other firms. But also, they created some amazing spaces for us. And for the last three and a half or four years, we’ve been constantly refurbishing different spaces, and it’s been an ongoing battle. But it’s been, it’s a great project.

SSR: When you talked about the Hoxton, you want to bring the community in, I feel like people probably had a lot of opinions on what the Gleneagles should be and shouldn’t be.

CN: Yeah, there were some newspaper articles talking about the London hipsters taking over an iconic institution, but for Sharan that was never on his radar. I think that there’s elements of the DNA of Hoxton that you can take to a hotel but, stylistically, it was never going to be anything like the Hoxton. We always look back to our roots for design inspiration and look back to the roots of the business. So we’re really playing off the glorious playground of the 1920s, and there’s a lot of fun to have with that.

SSR: And you worked with multiple design firms, right? There are at least four or five.

CN: We have. We worked with David Collins Studio. We’ve worked with Goddard Littlefair. We’ve worked with Macaulay Sinclair, just all at Gleneagles. We’ve taken over. We basically used other design firms for the first year, two years of the project, to a point where I had a team that was really capable of delivering. And we’ve done some amazing projects. We’ve had amazing opportunities with the projects that we’ve worked on there. We feel like we’ve made some great spaces, and the evolution of the hotel, outside of design, has been incredible. And there’s always been the most incredible service when you go to Gleneagles, and it’s so much more than just about design. It’s about the overall experience and the hospitality service, in general.

SSR: Is there one room or space that you’re most excited about at the hotel, or one that you think you really brought back that glamour in?

CN: I’m going to be biased because we’ve just finished the Strathearn restaurant at Gleneagles, which was a long project for us but it’s been an amazing journey. It’s really transformed as a high-end restaurant, white tablecloths, all of the toys. Swags and tails on the curtains, brass details, crystal chandeliers. It’s an amazing space, and we had a lot of fun working on that project.

SSR: Yeah, and bringing it up to speed for today.

CN: So yeah, all of the history that you would expect, and the service that you would expect, but today, with modern food.

SSR: And has there been a Hoxton hotel that you’ve been really proud of, or was a really great challenge that you guys figured out amazing solutions for of late?

CN: Williamsburg, we had lots of challenges on the construction front. It was a long project. I think the locals were waiting for a long time for that project to open. But we got there in the end. The best thing is that we got such a mixture of opportunities. We have some new builds, which have their own challenges because trying to create an authentic space in a new build can be challenging. But we also have buildings from the early 1900s, for example, in Downtown Los Angeles. We’ve got buildings in Paris from the 1700s. We really like that we’ve got such a mix. We’ll take on any challenge.

SSR: We’ve interviewed Sharan, your CEO, a couple times, and he’s just this dynamic person. He once told me that, you know, hiring is one of the most important things that he focuses on, and he doesn’t usually hire usual suspects, and will meet people and try to bring them in. So I was always inspired by that. But what have you learned from working with him the past few years and what has been maybe your best piece of advice that he’s given you?

CN: I’ve learned so much from Sharan over the last few years. I think working for such a dynamic and ambitious entrepreneur can be challenging. I think that we’ve overcome a lot of challenges, and we have a lot of fun working together as well. I’ve also realized what’s possible if you say, ‘How could we?’ rather than, ‘I don’t know how.’ And I think Sharan’s taught me that, because I think we have so many potential problems and things that are challenges, but it’s finding ways to solve them. And Sharan, that’s what he lives for.

SSR: Awesome. Well thank you so much for being here. It was such a pleasure to catch up.

CN: Thank you.