Larry Traxler

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Larry. Larry, thanks so much for joining us today.

Larry Traxler: Thanks for having me.

SSR: Excited to catch up with you. So we always start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

LT: I grew up in a giant town of 5,000 people in Shelby, Ohio. It was an interesting upbringing, but incredibly safe.

SSR: Nicely put. And did you always have a love of design or architecture from an early age?

LT: Growing up in Ohio, you don’t really have exposure to a lot of things like architecture and art and culture, but I think I found my way there at an early age. I mean, in sixth grade I won the Governor’s Award. I was able to showcase some art in Columbus, Ohio, and so that was my first exposure to the big city. And I knew I needed to get the heck out of Shelby after that. So, well, I didn’t necessarily understand what architecture was. My dad was a mason, so he was always building things. And he’s still to this day building things that you can easily buy, rather than just buy them. He’s always out fabricating things like kayak lifts for the garage that takes him three days when he could have bought it off Amazon in 15 minutes. So I think my love of building things, putting things together, tearing toys apart, and trying to figure out how to put them back together without any missing parts or pieces came about at an early age.

SSR: Was your mom artistic in any way?

LT: No. She’s pretty much your typical stay-at-home mom. She was actually an operator for AT&T for a good portion of my life. And so there’s not a whole lot of interesting things to talk about when you’re just answering phones and redirecting calls, but she was a great mom. She was always a big stable force at home. And she didn’t crush any of my creative tendencies outside of blasting music in my room at 10 o’clock at night. That was pretty much the only dampers that she put on my creativity.

SSR: And so you went to University of Cincinnati for architecture. How did you end up going there and why?

LT: Yeah, that’s a good story. So I was seriously into art when I was in high school. Thought I was going to go to an art institute, either Pittsburgh or RISD or one of those. And my senior art teacher said, ‘Listen, you’re graduating near the top of your class. Art is really tough. You probably shouldn’t just think about that.’ So, she got me an interview with the Dean of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati.

Again, I had really no idea what architecture was and whether I wanted to do that. But after interviewing with him and him telling me how hard it was and what a barrier. They get something like 3,000 applicants, they invite 150 people every year, 20 to 30 people graduate. It sounded like a really good challenge that I wanted to take on, even if I didn’t know what being an architect was at the time. I sort of landed in the archi-torture program accidentally. And before you know it, six years has passed and then you’re graduating, and then you’ve got to get to go out and make your way as an architect.

But the beauty of Cincinnati is that they have a co-op program. So after your second year of base core curriculum, you’re working in the field every other quarter. So you have a good exposure. My very first job out of the co-op program was with a group that did hospital design. I knew immediately that I never wanted to do that. It was incredibly complex and incredibly boring. My second co-op program, I was doing residential design. That was a lot of fun, but you can only design so many multimillion-dollar residences and really get into the details of designing people’s sock drawers. That sort of turned me off from residential design. So, when I graduated, I actually moved to Chicago the day that Skidmore laid off 300 people in 1990. So not a great day for Chicago architecture, but I found my way in bartending and eventually found my way at Jordan Mozer’s and embarked on architecture in a unique way through his creative studio.

SSR: And Jordan Mozer, so he’s your first hospitality job. How did you meet him?

LT: It’s a little bit like the people that catch fish, and the story gets embellished every year. I mean, this goes way back. But I vaguely remember meeting him at a bar, and we were talking about what he did and what I was doing. And I was bartending at the time. He mentioned that he had a design charette coming up the next day and wondered if I would be interested in showing up and helping him out. It was something for Disney. I don’t exactly remember what it was. But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be there at 9 a.m.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t show up at 9. That’s not a good time for us. We work different hours.’ He said, ‘Show up at 2.’ So, I showed up at 2. I think we ended up wrapping the first day at about 3 a.m. And that was the start of my career at Jordan’s. He said, ‘Do you want to show up again tomorrow?’ And so I did. And before I know it, it was seven years later and we’d done some pretty incredible things together.

SSR: What was one of your favorite projects that you worked on with him?

LT: I think my first project with him, which was a restaurant in Matsuyama, Japan called Surf and Turf. The whole narrative was this sort of collision between Japanese anime and reality. So the Surf and Turf characters became the logo and the icon. It was almost like walking through the door into a cartoon. Everything was colorful, very anime driven. We got to work with glassblowers and blacksmiths and sculptors to create everything down to the mugs, the light fixtures.

This is straight out of college, right? And in the middle of a really bad economic environment. But I got to go to Japan for a month and work closely with Japanese artisans, teaching them how to break tile to make mosaics. And that’s very anti-Japanese aesthetic, right? Everything has to be perfect. You don’t break things and then put them back together. And I found later that they actually do it really well. There’s a whole scenario where they make ceramics more beautiful by breaking them and putting them back together. Once I got to know the culture and understand the language enough that when my translator disappeared at 6 p.m. every night, we really got along even better when we didn’t speak the same language. We were just acting things out and trying to figure out how to communicate working ridiculous hours until 10, 11, and midnight for a month straight. I came back home for a couple of weeks and then flew back to Japan for the opening. So that started my love affair with restaurant design and working with artisans and really getting into the narrative storytelling of design.

SSR: And from there you went on to work for some of the industry greats: HBA, Wilson, and then [Ian] Schrager for a few years. I don’t know if we can go into all of them, but why, did you want to go to HBA and Wilson and try a larger firm? And what did you learn from working at kind of these industry staples?

LT: Yeah. I had been at Jordan’s for seven years and working from pretty much 9 in the morning until 2 in the morning. That’s kind of 35 years anywhere else. I felt like I was getting burned out, and I definitely developed a love for travel, and Asia really fascinated me at the time. I got an opportunity to interview with Michael Bedner for an opportunity in Singapore. I think it was more the idea of working in Singapore, then it was working for HBA or anything else. Granted, I took the job without going to Singapore. I’d never been there. I knew nothing about the office, other than he said, ‘It’s a great office, around 40 people, they’re doing all kinds of really incredible projects. Don’t you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ I don’t know, maybe three weeks later we had sold our house in Oak Park, Illinois, and my wife and I, were flying to Singapore. And talk about baptism by fire. We landed in July on [my wife’s] birthday in 1997, and the Asian financial crisis hit two months later. So we went from having all kinds of incredible plum jobs in Thailand and Malaysia, amazing resorts, to not being able to contact any of our owners, any of our development partners. We had something like $3 million in uncollectable fees in August after landing in July.

SSR: Oh, perfect.

LT: Yeah. Perfect timing. It’s kind of like moving to Chicago the day Skidmore laid everybody off. I think out of every challenge comes opportunity, and certainly we’re living through that now. After about three months of being in Singapore and starting to get my sea legs, our managing director resigned. Coming over as a design director, I ended up inheriting the managing director position and having to have regular phone calls with Santa Monica and working with them on an expanding our platform.

When Thailand dried up, and Malaysia and Indonesia dried up, we had to look to India and China for work. And nobody was really doing work yet in 1997 in either of those locations. So it wasn’t easy. But, again, it was a great challenge. The language barriers were high. The perpetual contractual negotiations were super high. But it was a fun challenge, and I met some great people.

But just in total 100 percent immersion into hospitality during one of the greatest financial downturns that Asia has seen. I mean, I lived through the India-Pakistan border conflict. I was in Jaipur the day that Pakistan detonated a nuclear warhead right on the border. So that was fun. We heard the airplanes go screeching across the sky. I was in Indonesia when Suharto was overthrown. I saw Mahatir closed down the Malaysia stock market. And I had just left Pakistan when Musharraf had his bloodless coup d’etat. It was a dynamic period in Asia, and a really interesting time to be building hotels, because hotels were very traditional, right? There was the big flagship Hiltons and Marriotts. And there wasn’t a lot of diversity in terms of availability. In India, you either stayed at a 5-Star beautiful property that was to die for, or you had hepatitis. There was nothing in between, right? There was no lifestyle. There was no focused services. None of this existed yet, so it was really a pioneer territory.

The same thing in China, right? There was no real mechanism for delivering anything other than 5-Star luxury. Even the Hilton properties were super high-end properties at that time. It was a great time to see the market, get to know people, understand how business works over there, because it was really the nascent stages of the hospitality industry. And figuring out how to get design fees paid and money out of India. If you had an ad services contract in India at the time, it had to be approved by the Federal Reserve Bank of India. Imagine what fun that is? Right? So, it was just easier to negotiate, ‘If you want us to do another restaurant, that’s going to be another $40,000, and I’ll fly over and bring an empty suitcase.’ And Singapore, it was an open market—it was a free port, so you could bring in up to $100,000 without declaring it. And that’s sort of how I cut my teeth in hospitality during a really dynamic period of growth in Southeast Asia.

SSR: Wow. I mean, I think maybe there’s a trend: where Larry is, something happens. And so, after your time in Southeast Asia with HBA, where did you go next and why?

LT: I think my story of my career has been very opportunistic. It’s sort of happened over time. While I was in Singapore, I started working with the owner of a hotel chain there, and his name was Albert Tio. And he really wanted to do a lifestyle hotel brand in Asia, but there was none. There was nothing of that type outside of the Aman resorts in Bali at the time. So, he wanted to approach lifestyle through the lens of what was happening in the U.S. at the time. And really Ian Schrager owned that space. He had already established his domain in New York City. But Albert was really taken with the Mondrian in LA, so we flew together over and explored that and explored the lifestyle hotel scene in LA. Together, we flew to New York and explored the various properties there as well. While I was in town, I had an opportunity to meet Anda Andrei and talk to her a little bit about what they did and how they did it. And she mentioned at the time that they were hiring. I extended my chat with her into an interview, and I ended up missing my flight back to Singapore the next day, because I was thinking and walking the city and wondering whether it was time to leave Asia.

Once that offer came in, I flew back to Singapore, and I think two months later we were on our way back to New York to start the journey with Ian. That was fantastic. There’s no other way to reenter the US after living that life of travel and diversity in Asia, than coming back to New York. And we had a pretty sweet gig. Ian had bought the St. Moritz at the time. That was my first project. He put us up there while we looked for a place to live. So we had a 2,000-square-foot apartment with a 500-square-foot terrace overlooking Central Park.

SSR: Oh, sure. Why not?

LT: Yeah. Yeah. Which makes it really difficult to look at apartments.

SSR: I was going to say, what did you find that was the equivalent of that?

LT: Well, we didn’t find anything until we absolutely had to. So we were doing demolition, and the demolition started in the basement and moved its way up. When they were started knocking walls out on the floor below us, that’s when we found an apartment, believe it or not. We ended up moving downtown. We found an amazing place down near Battery Park on 21 West that was 1,800-square-feet and it had a terrace that overlooked the Statue of Liberty.

SSR: Hey, there you go.

LT: It wasn’t a bad gig. But the St. Moritz ended up not coming through to fruition. It’s now the Ritz. So then I started working on Morgans soon after that renovation, the Hudson, projects in London. But then I inherited the Clift out in San Francisco. And, of course, we had just moved back from Singapore, moved to New York, and my very first gig is San Francisco. So I started commuting—a 14-month commute between New York and San Francisco. I’d go out 11 days to San Francisco, come back home and see Jerri for three days, and then fly back.

But it was a fantastic segue from the work that I was doing in Asia to coming back into the U.S. and working in the lifestyle space. I got to build my own team. Obviously, we’re working with Philippe Starck and Bruno Borrione at the time, but the actual construction documentation was being done pretty much in the basement of the Clift. I lived in the Clift. It was closed and under renovation. It was fantastic. I got to work out every detail. I could measure and make sure that every stone joint of the Pietra Serena flooring aligned with the columns’ center lines, I got to work with all of the many manufacturers and fabricators of the glass, and the video montages that were in the redwood room. I got to work with the artists to pull those together.

It was a fantastic immersion, and I had no distractions. It’s the one and only time of my life that I’ve worked on one project. I had one project to focus on. And I can still tell you, I mean, pre-renovation of the Clift, I can tell you where every stone joint, every why we have a panel relief joint there, where every light fixture is, the smoke detector. It was a unique experience and I got to meet some really great people while I was out there.

And because it was so distant from New York and Ian also had some London distractions at the time, I was really sort of left to my own devices. Philippe would even admit that. I think he came out three times. He came out during the kick-off, obviously; the model room review, probably about 50 percent through construction, and then for the grand opening. So, we took his napkin sketches and sort of built a hotel around that. I think that we really kept a lot of the design energy and inspiration that was inherent in those original, literally napkin sketches. I still have them.

SSR: That’s so cool.

LT: And we built the hotel around that. And we were left to our own devices for the most part. As long as I stayed under the $144 million budget, we were good.

SSR: Did you stay under it?

LT: Yes, we did. I think we had a million to spare. That was probably blown on the opening party. But, again, talk about timing. I mean, we opened that in August 2001. And September 11th happened not that long after that. The whole idea of lifestyle hotels and living in New York City suddenly lost a lot of its glamour and edge. And living on 21 West, I mean, we were literally a block south of the World Trade Center. So yeah, not a good time to live downtown.

SSR: What did you learn from working on such an iconic property like The Clift? And evolving that idea of lifestyle so early on, because that was one of the earliest ones with, from Ian and others, but it was very still early on in the evolution of what hotels were going to be or were becoming.

LT: I would say that this has been fairly consistent in my career. There’s always been a strong narrative or a storyline behind the design. I would say that the primary focus is on not losing that original idea, that original narrative or the storyline behind the concept and weaving it through each and every aspect of the decision-making process that you have along the way. There are a lot of small details that come along through the course of working on a hotel project. Everything down to the uniforms and the music and really making sure if there’s a consistency in the approach and the way that you’re looking at those things and not having them be random or arbitrary. Because that is what creates memories. When it all comes together, it’s really this sort of beautiful symphony of different pieces. You can play different pieces of the orchestra, and if they’re not all coming together beautifully, then it’s a big mess. It’s a big bunch of noise. So, really, I think that taking a storyline and narrative and really driving it all through every aspect of the design decision process is really key.

SSR: Okay. So you went back to Chicago, you’re trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up, what did you decide?

LT: Well, I decided I didn’t want to be in Chicago. Chicago had gotten really small. I loved it at first and then it became very provincial and nothing much changes. I think you could go back today and a lot of the same restaurants and are still there. And that’s part of the beauty of Chicago, but it’s also after living in New York and Asia and traveling to Pakistan and Qatar and spending time in Tokyo, it wasn’t for me anymore. I had an opportunity then to join Tricia Wilson and her team out in LA. So, LA sounded a lot more exciting than Chicago at the time. We sold our place in Chicago, packed up, and drove out to California and embarked on a really short period of time with Tricia and Margaret and the team at Wilson. But I think it was a really inspiring time. There were a lot of really exciting projects going on then. Again, much like us landing in New York and then my very first real project being in San Francisco, we drove out to LA, bought a house there, and then I spent probably more time in the Singapore and New York in the Wilson offices than I did in LA. So it’s just sort of random, but I got lots of frequent flyer miles and bouncing around.

SSR: And it was a hint of what was to come.

LT: It was a series of silos at the time. I think the New York office is doing really great stuff, but they were doing it all on their own. And then Johannesburg was doing their stuff, and they were doing it all on their own and Dallas was doing some great stuff. So one of my roles there was to try to piece them all together to make sure that there were similarities in the way that they were addressing documentation, how we did drawings, communication. I brought that perspective from being immersed in that world at HBA and trying to tie together the India office, the Singapore office, and the Santa Monica, London, and Atlanta offices at the time.

SSR: And what was it like to work for Trish?

LT: I really worked with Margaret more than Trish, Margaret and the team in Singapore. She’s an incredibly inspirational character though. I think that’s where I got my bug for investing time and energy into charity. One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from her, following her, her efforts to give back to Africa was that you really need to invest in bricks-and-mortars in any country that you’re trying to create change. Sending shoes and glasses and things like that—that’s all good—but things can go really wrong if you’re not building bricks-and-mortar and putting people on the ground, building up grassroots support mechanism for the charity effort that you’re trying to further. And you can’t take those away. Those don’t disappear as easily as shoes and other things. Books are great, but they oftentimes don’t end up where they’re supposed to. They’re not used for the right purposes. And when you build something tactical and permanent, it tends to take on a life of its own through the people that you create networks within that country.

SSR: And is this where you got your, I guess, your bug, right? Because he’s given so much back to you and Jerri have helped build that multipurpose center done in Rwanda. You’ve taken on other charitable causes around the DC areas. Do you want to talk a little bit about how this did it start?

LT: Yeah, quite honestly. I think that my career up until the state was so focused on learning everything that I could, about hospitality, about how hotels work, different design styles, how do you build the narrative, and how do you actually help hotels make money? I think it was so focused on the technical aspects of what goes into creating a hotel that I looked past a lot of the cultural implications, a lot of the positive socio-economic impacts of hotels. Although it was easy to see that in India—the positive impact of opening a hotel and what that did for that community, not only the people that work there, but the people that worked in and around the hotels. Oftentimes, we would have to set up educational facilities too. Especially when you’re in remote locations like the Thar Desert, you’re not busing people in from six hours away to work in the hotel. You have to create a hospitality platform there. So they were actually building schools nearby. You see that positive influence coming in through hospitality, but it wasn’t until I got to know Trish and her efforts to give back to the communities in Africa that I actually saw somebody in the hospitality industry giving back in that significant fashion. Going to hear her speak and at a couple of fundraisers that’s when I think my eyes opened to that. And we were still living paycheck to paycheck, but there’s always a dinner out that you can give up and networks that you can bridge and connections that you can make. So I think it started small then, but that’s when my eyes opened to the opportunities that existed there.

SSR: So, moving on to onto your next job. Did you leave Wilson to go to Hyatt? Was that when that happened?

LT: Yes, a recurring thing, and we just closed on a house on Melrose in West Hollywood. And I got a call from Hyatt, from Gary Dollens and said, ‘Hey, we’d love to have you come and work with us. We’d love to have you head up North American and the Caribbean projects.’ So, we closed on our house. I actually took the call during the closing. And that’s when the offer came in, he gave me the offer details, and I said, ‘okay.’ Our real estate agent was there at the time. And I said, we’re just going to put it back on the market right now. And that was a really good time in the market. We had five backup offers that were waiting. We put it back on the market and sold it 30 days later for $30,000 more and packed everything up and moved back to Chicago again.

SSR: Jerri is a saint.

LT: She has a lot of blind faith and trust and in my decision-making process.

SSR: So why Hyatt? What enticed you to go there?

LT: Listen, when I lived in Asia, all of the greatest properties were Hyatts. The Park Hyatts, the Grand Hyatts. They were the most inspirational, the least cookie-cutter, the least North American centric in terms of their design inspiration. Their food-and-beverage program was amazing. It was really exciting. The fact that they owned a good proportion of their properties in North America, and I was going to be heading that up meant that I could make a pretty big impact in those properties. If the Pritzkers owned the place and the GM reports to Tom and Nick and I’m the design guy who’s supporting their vision, they have to listen to you. They can’t create their own. There are no little fiefdoms. They can’t have secret projects on their own like most GMs do. Anybody who knows a GM knows that they like to build the hotel around their vision.

I knew that I could actually create a big impact there. And it seemed like a good way of stepping outside of the world of design again. Even Ian’s studio was unique, it was something between being an operator and a brand. It was really this collaborative thought school, right there. It wasn’t like we own hotels, even though we did. They would make decisions based on a design as opposed to revenue. He still made money, but he would make decisions that were not necessarily focused on growth and number of hotel rooms, and how do we build our pipeline?

I thought Hyatt it would be a good way of getting back into that world without selling my soul and giving up on design. So I really think that my time at Hyatt where I built a great team. We were managing hundreds of millions of dollars in CapEx on doing renovations and all of the 40-some odd properties they owned and North America building new properties, and then launching the Andaz brand. It was really a time of growth and bringing that sort of Asian-centric, elevated design methodology back to the U.S. and really taking the cookie-cutter revenue-driven decision-making process and creating more experiences and being more about design.

SSR: What was it like creating the Andaz brand?

LT: It was awesome. There’s nothing like creating a brand. The first time of doing anything is difficult, right? I mean, riding a bike for the first time you’re going to skin your knees. It was an interesting process because Hyatt hadn’t really created any brands. If you think about at the time as Hyatt, there was Grand Hyatt, Park Hyatt. The Grand Hyatt was largely driven around being in its proximity to Grand Central. The Park Hyatt was driven largely by its location and proximity to the park in Chicago. So they were happy accidents, but they weren’t really focused efforts to create a brand. We have to blow the cobwebs off of the hospitality industry in North America—take the best pieces and parts of lifestyle hotels at the time, which a lot of them were more about style than they were substance or guest experience.

If you weren’t cool, if you weren’t a movie star, you oftentimes got shunned at those lifestyle properties. How do you take the best of really designed, driven, full-service brand with a lifestyle brand and create this design-led concept that is about culture and food and beverage and really sort of breaking the mold of what hospitality was in North America, and re-envision it for what it is today? So getting rid of the reception desk, getting rid of a lot of the notions of what you had to have in a hotel, and then really trying to create something that was more guest-centric than it was design-centric in terms of the lifestyle space, because that didn’t exist at the time.

SSR: I know you worked on The Clift obviously, and you worked on other hotels with Wilson and HBA. Was this your first time really coming up with a brand from beginning to end?

LT: Yeah. Very much so. And we had the notion of the brand, and then we had Pritzker money behind the launch of the brand, which is really important because you can craft it in the vision that you know, where all of the time and energy and thought process was behind it, you didn’t rely on somebody else to deliver that. And then we had another unique project that came along, which was other people’s money, and that was Andaz Wall Street. So, we were working on the launch of the brand as well as Andaz Wall Street, Andaz Fifth the same time. So, Tony Chi on Fifth and Rockwell Group on Andaz Wall. So other people’s money, Pritzker money, 1 million a key 400,000 a key. There were two dramatically different worlds, and it was fun trying to figure out the path of the brand between those two really wide guardrails.

And I think that the storyline, the ethos of the brand really came together because we have those two polar opposites, right? Andaz would be very much a luxury brand today and sit in a very high level of space among the luxury brands if it wasn’t for Wall Street being developed at the same time. And I think that it landed in a happy medium that’s giving it some legs and ability to expand, which then, of course, further informed my efforts when I came over to Hilton and looking at the Canopy brand and looking at accessible lifestyle, how do you create even more inclusivity and expansion possibilities, but still try to deliver something that’s fun and inspired and design led.

SSR: So why did you make the jump to Hilton? And did you buy another house in Chicago before you moved to the East Coast?

LT: Yes, we did. We had a beautiful loft overlooking the South Loop, a 2,000-square-foot terrace. It was absolutely amazing. I loved working with Nick and Tom and Dollens and the team at Hyatt. I knew every GM at every one of our properties. They embraced you like a family member every time you arrived at a hotel. There’s a really great culture there. But, ultimately, North America and the Caribbean got too small for me. I really love international work, and I get inspired by international travel and just being in Denver or San Antonio and every so often getting out to Trinidad that was the big fling in terms of projects. It was too confining. And I got a call from a former Hyatt colleague who had gone over and joined Chris Nassetta on running the development for Hilton the time.

I knew very little about Hilton other than what I knew of them in Asia Pacific. The Conrad in Tokyo is a stunning property, but most of the Hilton’s were pretty vanilla, I would say. And not memorable. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience. I’ve never worked on one with HBA or Wilson, but Steve Goldman gave me a call, asked me to fly out to LA, and I met Chris Nassetta and Matt Richardson and him. We talked about the Blackstone buyouts, the merger between international domestic, all the potentials that existed there. It sounded really exciting. I think that I was selfishly looking more toward international development and growth and that seemed really appealing to me.

But keep in mind, this is 2008 during the height of the financial crisis. I had a really comfortable job. I was flying with Tom and Nick to look at properties on their private jet and had an incredible amount of job security there. And we knew Chicago well, we had friends. So this was a big leap of faith. But after speaking to Chris and hearing his vision for what he saw as the future of Hilton and the potential that was untapped, I had to take that leap of faith. I’m always up for a challenge. I don’t think that I had any idea what I was getting into at the time. I mean, Hyatt was 415 hotels at the time. I think when I joined Hilton it was 3,600 hotels. We had 590,000 rooms or something like that at the time. So I knew that I was biting off a big chunk.

And I also knew, from speaking to Chris that there were a lot of things to fix. The UK—obviously they were different companies, right?—so, the UK was going off on its own path. Asia was doing its own thing. India was off the charts, they weren’t talking to anybody doing their own things. And so there was going to be a lot of breaking eggs to make this omelet before we would ever get to start making the omelet. We would just be baking eggs for years, and it sounded really enticing. It’s almost like taking the Andaz brand and helping give birth to that but taking eight brands at the time and giving them shape and form and a voice that made more sense. So, it sounded really enticing. If I had really thought about it, much like Singapore, I probably would have just stayed in my comfort zone. But Chris is a good salesman.

SSR: So where do you even begin? What was your step one?

LT: We were 3,600 hotels back then. Today, we’re at 6,500 hotels. We’ve nearly doubled. Our pipeline at the time was 900 hotels or something like that globally. We’re 2,600-plus right now. We were eight brands then, we’re 18 now—and thoughtful brands that are all developed internally with a very clear swim lane and ethos that is focused on creating space between its two brands on either side of it.

I think that what we did first was figure out who we had on the team that was valuable and who we needed to jettison and how we started rebuilding. I flew around the world. At that time, we only had four offices where we had architecture and design studios and we were developing, I would say 80 percent of our pipeline growth was in North America, 20 percent in the rest of the world. So just imagine the disparity there. I mean, 80 percent in North America, and then it was Hampton HGI at the time. So the potential was massive, but we had to get the machine right. We had to build the team first. So we pretty much let everybody go. We rebuilt from the ground up. And we all sit at 11 offices around the world with close to 260 people—architects and interior designers.

In the offices—three in North America, London, Dubai, Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, Cape town, Johannesburg—a really dynamic group of people. When I first came in, we had some people that worked their way up through housekeeping into the design world. We need designers who are leading professionals and to deliver new hotels. So we fixed that. We rebuilt that, we had I think seven different design and construction standards around the world, and they were all different. Then, we had to multiply that by eight, because we had eight brands. So, we had 56 different design standards. If you were an owner, when trying to build an HGI in the U.S. and then you wanted to build one in Mexico, you had a different set of rules. And it was tough. There’s a huge barrier to entry. So, we broke everything. We broke the brand, the design and construction standards, the brand standards. We never had a design narrative when I joined Hilton—nothing that communicated to an owner or a designer, what the brand was about what is the brand ethos? What is the customer journey? What are the key brand pillars and what stays consistent in that brand ethos and that brand story in the U.S.? And how does it vary when you pick it up and plug it into Japan, right? We have all those tools now, and that’s why it’s a lot easier to build and grow.

In spite of all the challenges of 2020, we still grew at a rate of over 5 percent and opened over 400 hotels. So that’s a testament that’s in process, right? The process is a really well-oiled machine. I have a great team that supports me around the world. I mean, most of my people in senior leadership positions have been with me for 10 years. I’ve been with the company for 12, I think, yeah, there’s a couple that are 11 and 12 as well. So, you know Vito and Leo and Chris Webb have been with me for almost the whole duration.

It’s a great journey, and the creation, the dynamic creation of new brands and really thoughtful creation of new brands where we have white space is part of that fun because it really helps us. A lot of people think that there’s brand proliferation and there are too many brands, but really what’s happening is that we’re able to keep our core hard brands more focused and truer to their vision and the things that fall along the fringe, they go into the collection brands, or they go into another brand that we’ve created. There’s more consistency and more clarity behind the core brands as a result of creating these other brands that we all created because there was a development ask for them. Our developers are saying, ‘we really need this in this market.’ And we say, ‘we’re not going to bend our brands to meet that, but we can create a new brand that actually answers that customer segment and that development growth mechanism.’ So, yeah, it was fun. Still is fun.

SSR: Still is fun. So how many projects are you currently working on, give or take?

LT: Give or take? So it’s down a little bit since the end of 2019. I’d say we’re right at about 2,600 hotels, about 400,000 rooms and 100 countries.

SSR: Sure.

LT: We’re busy.

SSR: So Conrad, Waldorf, I know that’s been a focus of yours as of late. How are you evolving them and what luxury means today? Even before COVID, how are you looking at that, what lens were you looking through?

LT: So we were really lucky. In 2019, we did a deep dive with Redscout on brand positioning and really doing a ton of consumer insight across 20 different countries. Hearing guests feedback on what it is to stay in a Conrad property, what you love about it, what you would love to see. We did this for all 18 of our brands, or at the time 16 of the brands. We had all of that information just sort of sitting there at the end of 2019. And then we had a bit of a pause at the beginning of 2020, where we were able to take all of that information and really sort of distill it down into a post-positioning effort and really give voice to each of the verticals that sit within the brand.

What is the service ethos? What is the design ethos? What is the operational ethos and give clarity around those. What we found is that luxury is probably changing faster than any other segment. A lot of our hotel segments are blurring into more of a jumble of lifestyle. We have lifestyle Hamptons. OTO built a beautiful Hampton in Santa Monica that could be a Tempo, right, if it wasn’t for the hotel rooms, which were prototypical Hampton. lifestyle is invading all aspects of the brand segments, even luxury, right? We have to really understand what the luxury guest is looking for. They’re looking for something that’s more casual, more relaxed, more approachable, but at the same time, not deviating into that lifestyle space.

There’s a very different set of feedback that we’ve achieved through our consumer insight from Waldorf and Conrad guests, they are very different. You can’t just lump luxury into one bucket and say that this is what they’re looking for. A Waldorf guest is very much looking for more partnerships with similar luxury brands and hence our work into creating the drive experiences with Maserati and Lamborghini and others. Conrad is very much about culture, cultural exploration, food and beverage, music, art. We’re really starting to hone down into what the consumer is telling us about why they stay in a Waldorf and really focusing our design efforts on making sure that we’re delivering there.

The outcome, it’s a lot more work to really sort of layer that onto the whole backbone of the operational efficiency, the design layout relating to sense of place. But then layering on that additional brand positioning piece is making the properties that we’re opening now so much richer in terms of experience—more layered and complex in terms of the art program, the food and beverage program—really thinking about what is relevant for that market where we’re opening. It’s not just a grill, right? You don’t just have a grill in Bangkok, but what’s happening at the top of the restaurant or top of the hotel, but really drives locals as well as international travelers. So it’s a lot of fun. I would say luxury is morphing dramatically. We have three lifestyle brands. We used to have one, so Motto in the micro space, Tempo and Canopy. So that’s growing, we opened close to 20 Canopies last year. Haven’t gotten to see many of them, but …

SSR: It must be killing you.

LT: Yes. Everything is moving so quickly. And obviously, now we have this whole layer of COVID response, right? So, how do we layer in the notion of cultural exchange, authenticity, diversity, empathy. How does that find its way into the design of our hotels? And certainly, how do we weave it into the service culture? I think that’s even more important. I’ve probably spent more time in over the course of 2020 talking to doctors and psychologists trying to understand what people are going through mentally, both on my team and our guests, but also, physicists and scientists who are understanding the pathogen travel, how we filter it out of the air. Design almost got put on hold for three or four months while we tried to understand everything else that was going on. So that we made sure that what we were doing in design was relevant and responsive to our team members’ safety, our guest safety, that we weren’t adding on additional costs or owners. We had greenwashing before, now we have COVID washing, right? I was getting calls and emails daily on for antimicrobial fabrics. It doesn’t matter if it’s a virus if your fabric is anti-microbial, does it?

Hospitality in general is going to go through a major transition. There’s going to be a lot of things that remain the same. But I think that some of the core things that we’ve been exploring in the past, like wellness, biophilia, the creation of a connection to a locale, a blurring of lines between indoors and outdoors, those are going to be even more prominent as we come out of this and start our path towards recovery.

SSR: You’ve worked with so many amazing designers across, throughout your career. What do you look for in a collaborator and how do you pick someone to take on a project?

LT: We love to work with designers who are creative and dynamic front leaders, but that’s not the be-all, and end-all. It’s absolutely imperative that they understand our business and our brands and where we sit in our field in terms of competition because it’s really difficult to embark on a two to five-year journey with somebody that isn’t learning those key things along the way.

I would say that we tend to go back to design studios that do their homework, that come prepared and understand what the dynamics of the building in Myanmar might mean, which have a sense of what the cultural ramifications are of building in that location. They show flexibility in their design approach. It isn’t designed for design’s sake and the unique value aspects of each hotel are more important than their signature design style. Sometimes when we do want to go to starchitects or star designers who have a very identifiable style, but I would say for the most part, we’d rather work with somebody who has a diversity in different design languages and can morph their discipline and their inspiration into a unique product for each and every project because guests don’t want to see the same thing when they’re traveling to New York and then to Tokyo, right? They want to see something different.

They want to explore the culture, they want to be inspired in all they want to explore. And people aren’t just traveling because of business, right? They’re embracing the culture as well. So the hotel should exude that, they should embody that. So, [we look for] people that show flexibility in their design style that listen and that really tried to answer the business aspects, as well as creating a beautiful hotel. Those are the ones that we enjoy working with. Because as you know, you do the math: 260 architects and interior designers and 2,600 hotels. We’re each handling a big load of projects and they’re complex, so we need to rely on those design partners to really deliver on their end of the bargain.

SSR: Right. Is there one, okay, let’s do a little lightning round. Is there one property that recently opened or was renovated that you are super excited about?

LT: I can’t wait to go see the Waldorf in the Maldives. It’s truly an amazing property. I got to visit there many times during construction, when we had to take a barge off of the island at the end of every day with the workers to go stay at another hotel, but it’s open and trading now. I’d love to see that property as soon as possible. A private Island just open too.

SSR: Oh, well, I’m in. Just let me know. It’s crazy that you’ve done, what did you say, 10 brands in the past 11 years give or take? I mean, I don’t know how you did your day job while launching all these brands, but is there one that you are most proud of?

LT: Canopy took the longest. I would say that we worked on that for five years. I’m really happy and proud with where that brand is going. And I think it has got an incredible momentum, both domestically and internationally. And we’re going to be opening a few properties in Paris very soon that are just going to shock the world. They’re really cool. It’s probably the Canopy brand.

SSR: Okay, so in 2019, how many miles did you fly? Do you think?

LT: If I consolidated American, United, Emirates, and Singapore Air, it was about 300,000.

SSR: Okay. How many miles did you fly in the last year?

LT: I flew to Cancun or HD summit, and I flew to South Africa. So about 2,000 miles.

SSR: Yeah. What do you miss most about traveling?

LT: Oh, God, the culture, food, interaction with people. It’s so funny, I don’t go to the grocery store very often. Jerri handles most of those duties, but when I do go out, I’m just fascinated by people and how goofy they are and how clumsy they are in terms of social etiquette. And it’s going to be a lot of fun seeing people come back together again. It’s going to be really clumsy.

SSR: What is your favorite pastime to keep yourself sane in these past few months or year?

LT: I haven’t had a whole lot of free time. That’s part of the bane of working from home is that you tend to start answering calls and emails at 7 a.m. with China and Singapore and finish at 8 p.m. with Sydney. There hasn’t been a whole lot of free time. We’re doing a lot more work with Warrior Canine Connection right now, our favorite charity because we get to puppy parent dogs and training. We had a six-month old yellow lab for a couple of months. We had Reston who’s a year and a half, just leave last week. So We’re training assist dogs for the returning veterans and the donkeys. The donkeys have been incredibly safe. As you know, the farm is out in the middle of nowhere, fresh air. The donkeys don’t have COVID; they don’t mind us. We don’t have to wear a mask around them. So that has been a good pastime.

SSR: For those that are listening, it’s a rescue farm for donkeys, right, and small horses?

LT: Yeah, a little long ears, so donkey rescue.

SSR: Love it. Okay. You are working for Chris Nasetta, Pritzkers, Ian Schrager, Tricia Wilson, Michael Bedner some heavy hitters. What did you learn from Ian versus Chris versus the Pritzkers? Is that possible?

LT: Yeah, that’s a good question. So Ian’s a visionary, and he has to be very much a part of the details and the delivery. But you have to get to know his communication style and understand what he’s asking for because it isn’t immediately evident. Tom and Nick Pritzker are very straight and to the point. They know exactly what they want, and they go away and let you do your job. I would say that with Michael and Trish, I was largely operating outside of their sphere of influence. I was working with a legacy of them, which is huge in the industry. On one hand, you’re trying to deliver to the expectation that has come upon the legacy of which their names were built.

I would say that my biggest takeaway with working with Chris is that he is so laser-focused on culture and making sure that there is a company-wide embrace of thought, diversity, empathy. Everything that he does speaks to that. And he is all about building a team. From day one, when I met him in LA until now, he talks about team building. And we don’t do this unless the team can deliver. And he’s right. It doesn’t matter how nice the hotel is designed. If the people that are welcoming guests into that hotel, if they’re not making the meals and delivering service. If they don’t have that same sense of cultural support and delivery of the light and warmth of hospitality, then it all falls apart.

So that’s been my biggest takeaway with working with him. He is so focused on building the right culture. And there’s been nobody that I’ve felt more comfort in listening speak over the course of 2020 than Chris. He’s been just a steady hand on the wheel. Hugely optimistic, every time. When we were closing more hotels than we had open, he was optimistic and very supportive of us and really looking out for the wellbeing of everybody that was delivering hotels and delivering hospitality. I haven’t seen that anywhere else that I’ve been.

SSR: What’s your outlook for ’21 and beyond?

LT: It’s huge. Yeah. I think we’re hugely optimistic about the second half of 2021. I think once we get the vaccine rollout in place, there’s going to be an incredible pent-up. I mean, you know this. How anxious are you to travel? And there’s some survey out that something like 80 percent of Americans plan on traveling in 2021. I can’t wait to get on an Amtrak train. I mean, I’ve never said that before. I just want to get up to New York, and I want to explore. I think that it’s going to be huge. I think we’re going to get smacked with how busy things are. I think the opportunities are great for 2021. We’re going to be incredibly busy by the end of the year. And be looking back and saying, ‘Glad that I got caught up on my sleep in 2020.’

SSR: But what was your most challenging project and why? Or what has been?

LT: Yeah, well, I think, two different sides of that coin. Probably the most challenging project that we’ve ever embarked on would be the Waldorf in New York. I think we started the master planning on that property back in 2014. We did model rooms with Alex and Champalimaud in 2017, 2018? We sold the property. And we’re still building out the vision. It’s going to be amazing. It will be the best luxury property in New York, with the average room size is well over 600 square feet. The public areas in the landmark spaces are going to be brought back to their original grandeur. That hotel needed this and needed a complete shutdown. And really the investment of our Chinese investors. Nobody has pockets that deep. It’s been a huge undertaking on their part, but they are remaining true to their original vision. And it’s going to be an amazing property. And so I would say the longest and the most difficult is that.

SSR: And then two more quick ones, and then we can wrap it up. But how did your leadership or your take on being a leader change in 2020?

LT: I focused a lot less on design and particular projects and more on the mindset of our team. ‘How are you doing? What challenges are you facing? Is there anything that we can do to help with that?’ I’ve asked way more, ‘How I can help?’ How can I break down barriers? How can I create connections. I probably looked at less drawings in 2020 than ever and spent more time on people and really thinking about how we keep people’s head in the game. How we help keep them inspired and happy in spite of the challenges. We took away a lot of the concern that might be out there in terms of not working in an office and not being able to run into people in the elevator at the water cooler, where you have casual social action.

It’s tough to convey a lot of these things. You call a formal meeting and everybody’s nervous, right? But if you just run into them in the elevator and you say, ‘How’s everything going?’ It’s way different. So I would say that really keeping people’s eyes focused ahead and staying optimistic is what I did a lot more of in 2020. And I hope that doesn’t necessarily change, but I hope that that culture permeates and cascades downward amongst everybody on the team. We’re a lot more empathetic and a lot more collaborative as a team moving forward. I’ve already seen it. Everybody is a lot friendlier. The thing I keep hearing is that ‘I can’t wait to get together with my colleagues again. I can’t wait to get together and have a beer.’ But they’re already a lot friendlier and closer, and they know more about their home lives and their dogs. And we know way more than we need to know about people’s dogs and cats. We’ve seen them on the Zoom calls. But that’s a piece of their personal life. Right?

I think that we’re going to come out of this in the recovery mode in a lot more of a positive fashion after that. And I would say that goes not only to our team, our immediate team but also to our owners. We’re listening to them. What are their challenges? How do you serve breakfast in a COVID environment? And that’s changed seven times since March last year. And so we have to continually evolve and keep and stay nimble and agile. And keep thinking forward about how we do things as things start reopening?

SSR: Before we wrap, I want to get back to your giving nature and how much you’ve done. And talk about how you and your wife, Jerri, built the library in Rwanda. And now you’re also building a multipurpose center for the same community? Talk a little bit about that and what that’s meant, and where you are?

LT: We went to track the gorillas in I think, 2009, 2010. And where the gorillas are situated in Rwanda is a very remote location, about a three-hour drive outside of Kigali at the main capital city. So we stayed at this little eco-lodge at the top of a volcano, and there was a local school there. It’s a small village of 2,000 people. If you want to bring something for the school, bring pens, paper, English books because they’re trying to learn English. And we’re thinking, ‘A village of 2,000, how many kids can there be? There’s probably maybe 50.’ I don’t know, 100?’ We showed up. We packed a big duffel bag, a big hockey duffel bag, full of books and stuff. We towed it along and went down to the school one day between treks, and 700 students came running out because they heard there were white people there. So, they all ran out. And we ended up hanging out with them for the afternoon. We chatted with the teachers who really wanted to speak to us because they were learning English.

Their president, Kagame at the time, had mandated that the Belgians and the French were complicit in the genocide. And therefore, they no longer wanted to teach in French. Also, they’re teaching in Kinyarwandan or English. But they didn’t bother to teach the teachers English before mandating this. So a lot of the classrooms were actually dark and quiet because the teachers are learning English while the students sat and behaved themselves quietly in a hot brick classroom. After seeing this and spending a bunch of time with the kids, we came back and said, ‘We have to do something.’ We didn’t know what that meant. But at first, we thought it was sending books over. We started raising money, started doing some research, created some connections with a local 501(c)(3)s, and ended up building an art program, a book program—getting to know the school better.

We created connections with some teachers in Uganda who came down and helped us do a mural that would talk about the future and what their hopes were for the children. We ended up having them do an art program, and we brought some of the art back and sold it to raise money. And we ended up raising enough money to build a small library, which completely changed the dynamic of this little village at the top of a volcano. It’s literally an hour walk downhill to get to the nearest post office or book shop or anything like that.

Having this at their disposal at the top of the hill changed their lives and became the cultural hub of the village. We shipped laptops over, iPads. There are 5,000 books there. It was being used as a daycare center, a woman’s female cooperative, where they were sewing pouches and pillowcases and things like that and making money. Now the purpose of the library is almost getting squashed by all of the other cultural things that are happening in it. We have to build a cultural center to help create some space around the library. We’re raising money for that. And we’ve had some really great sponsors. The Dobins have been fantastic. And Dan Ryan and Jesse Kalisher was a huge supporter as well. The goal is to call it the Kalisher Multipurpose Center.

The ground is cleared. The foundation is actually poured now. And we just have to raise the last remaining funds to build it. We’ve been able to create some amazing partnerships. We have architects who are doing work pro-bono. The contractors in Africa Energy are donating a huge amount of money. And our last ribbon-cutting for the library, over 500 people came, including the mayor of Kigali. And so it was a big deal. It’s kind of fun being a celebrity in [this] little village of 2,000. It reminds me a lot of where I grew up.

SSR: Amazing. All right, well, I can talk to you forever, but I feel like we should wrap up. And we always end the pod with the title of the podcast. So, what has been your greatest lesson or lessons learned?

LT: You’ve heard this come out in a few different stories along this journey. I would say that it’s better to be lucky than good. I would say that whichever of those categories that you happen to land in, you have to show up fully committed, ready to put in the hours, work hard, be kind. Be passionate about everything that you do. And if you invest everything that you have, opportunities actually land in your lap. I’m a huge believer in that. I don’t think I had any idea that my journey was going to take me from Chicago to Singapore to New York to LA—to all the places in-between. But I threw everything that I had into every step along the way. And there’s no other choice. You can’t fail—just keep focused on the positive, keep moving ahead. And there’s always going to be adversity. Never let challenges stop you from what you want to do. Keep your eye on the future.

SSR: Love it. Well, thank you, Larry. It was such a pleasure to hang out with you. And hopefully, we’ll see each other in real life sooner rather than later, not over Zoom.

LT: Exactly. It would be nice to have a hug.

SSR: Yes. A virtual hug.