Dana Kalczak, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I am here with Dana Kalczak in Toronto at the Four Seasons’ office. Hi, Dana. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Dana Kalczak: Hey Stacy, welcome.

SSR: Thanks for joining us. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

DK: So I grew up in Toronto, Canada. Actually my parents immigrated, the whole family immigrated from Poland when I was seven, but for all intents and purposes, Canadian. Raised in Toronto and schooled in Toronto as well. I went to the University of Toronto, the School of Architecture, which was a five year blast. It was an amazing experience, because it was it an experimental school. It didn’t have the kind of structure that the rest of the university schools had. It was pretty free form pedagogically speaking and challenging. What it taught is how to think, ow one approaches a problem or a space or a building and so that was the genesis of that whole human-centric tract I’ve been on my whole career.

SSR: That’s amazing. So did you at least know you wanted to be a designer or go into architecture?

DK: I have an aunt on my father’s side who was an architect, but that didn’t seem to be the genesis, perhaps it sowed a seed. I really made up my mind in an instant, and I’ve told you this story before; it’s clear in my mind. I opened the art book in my grade 9 art class, and I saw an image of the Hagia Sophia, the amazing building in Istanbul. I just said to myself, ‘I want to do that. I want to build something as amazing as that.’ So when I go back to Istanbul, I always make time to go to the Hagia Sophia. I pay homage to the building that formed my career.

SSR: So you go to architecture school. What’s next? What’s your first job out of school?

DK: I was really lucky. There was a couple, literally a couple, a husband and wife, they practice architecture in their small studio together. Interesting names, Kleinfeld Mihaljevic, and they were a couple of years ahead of me in the School of Architecture and they set up their own studio, and I answered one of those ads posted on a bulletin board in the School of Architecture, and I joined them. It was wonderful. Two years with them.

SSR: What kind of projects were you working on?

DK: They were institutional and residential, quite a lot of residential. We did homes, we did a police station, a church, office buildings—a smattering across the board.

SSR: From there is that where you got into hospitality or was there another step?

DK: There was another step. After that, a friend of mine started working in another architect, started working for a Canadian named Garth Drabinsky. Curious story that he was actually the inventor of the multiplex cinema in 1976. He built the first cinema that had more than just one house and one screen. I joined [now Mesbur+Smith Architect], who work primarily with this visionary. Cineplex Odeon is the name of the company. They were our primary client and I spent 14 years working for this charismatic cult leader. He was unbelievable. He could make anyone drink Kool-Aid.

SSR: What was it like redefining what cinemas were back then?

DK: It was a radical time. It wasn’t evolutionary, it was revolutionary, because I joined in the ’80s and that was quite soon after the concept started rolling out. It was new. It was challenged. People didn’t think it would be a success, but this guy really believed in it and we hammered them out from Knoxville, Tennessee to Budapest in Hungary. When I left the company, we were expanding into Europe, having built many of them in North America. It was an exciting time.

SSR: Did you take anything that you learned there with you when you came over to hospitality, any kind of lessons learned?

DK: The big one is acoustics, because building cinemas and live theaters, you can imagine you really have to be careful about sound—sound transmission, sound quality. Here in the world of hospitality, creating a quiet room and a dark room to get a great nights rest is super important. So I put that to use. Actually, I trotted out in meetings and people are quite surprised to hear the lingo of an acoustical knowledge. All kinds of things that you learn about sound and how it travels.

SSR:  I bet that’s so important. So what brought you to Four Seasons? Was it the opportunity, the idea of hospitality, the brand?

DK: Well, it was two-fold. First, it was by chance, actually. I was happily employed. But a fellow that I’d worked with had joined Four Seasons a number of years before, and he called me and said this is a great company, why don’t you come and interview. I did. The story is true. I interviewed with a lovely man named Chris Walllis, who was head of the department and in fact, kind of the founding father of the design and construction department. Chris said at the end, “You’re intelligent, you’re well educated, you’re obviously determined, but unfortunately you’re a woman. And so I can’t hire you.’ I said, ‘All right, perhaps you’d like to tell me why.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know you have to travel, you have to work with a lot of men, the position that’s open is to lead the construction of several projects in the Middle East and that’s not a place for a woman to be.’

So, I accepted graciously and faded into the background and got a call six months later and it was Chris Wallis. I said, ‘Oh, hello, Mr. Wallis, nice to hear from you, but you know I’m still a woman. I haven’t changed that. So what’s changed on your end?’ He said, ‘One of our people left suddenly.’ That was George Lagusis. He ended up going to the Fairmont. He said, ‘Now I’m desperate, and I know you can do the job so please join.’ And my region was the Middle East, so it was a trial by fire. My first project was in Amman, Jordan.

SSR: So many questions from this. How did that inspire you to do better? Did that put a little fire in you? It seems like it would set you back a little bit but maybe it propelled you forward a bit.

DK: It’s an interesting way of framing the question. I was taken aback because my position then was VP of design and construction at the previous company and I led a large team. So I was taken aback, but what can you say to something like that? It’s that person’s choice and there’s no point in trying to change their mind. He changed his own mind. I’m a person of determination, let’s put it politely, sometimes perhaps even defiance, but determination for sure, and so I was convinced I could do it. And when I went out to the Middle East, I gave myself no option but to succeed, I did.

It’s really interesting what Bianca [Andreescu], the new Grand Slam champion who’s a Canadian tennis player said that she visualizes, that she meditates and visualizes and that she saw this championship coming her way because she could see it. And I could see my success. I was not going to back down. And I built Amman with a Western team and with a local team that was really accepting. As soon as they figured out that I would make their jobs easier to do and that we would get this building built despite September 11th, which occurred in the middle of construction and caused a lot of difficulty. The American suppliers all canceled their orders, so we had to scramble to get air handling units and other things. But through it all, I was going to make it happen.

SSR: And so you started in the Middle East obviously. What was next in Four Seasons? So that was your first territory, because now you oversee everything globally.

DK: So I did start in the Middle East. Then, I moved on to leading the Asia Pacific team, gave me a whole other exposure. And then around 2008, our then-CEO Katie Taylor asked me to involve myself globally to make sure that there was a consistent product quality expectation globally. Because she was convinced that we needed to have oversight to push for product excellence across the board. In fact, that’s when she involved me in renovations. My world had just been new builds until then.

I’ll tell you a great story about Katie Taylor and her decision. She had gone to Doha and the usual procedure for reviewing a model room is you get taken into the old one to refresh your memory, and then right next door you were taken into the new one, or the renovation. They forgot the first step, and she was taken directly into the renovated room and she looked around she said, ‘Okay, uh huh, now show me the new room.’ Everyone looked around and said, ‘Well, you are in the renovated room.’ She said, ‘This is what it’s going to look like?’ It wasn’t much of a change. They were going to spend millions and millions of dollars and there was nothing transformational about it. So she picked up the phone and she said, ‘You have to go to Doha and fix this, and I want you to oversee the renovations as well from the design perspective.’ That was the next step of my career, the design oversight.

SSR: From working in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, what have you learned in terms of working in all these various places? What’s the key to success when working with these different developers and owners in various regions?

DK: Because of our business model, we don’t build our own money, we work with developers and owners, it’s a challenge to start with because if you’re holding the purse strings, you can make things happen the way that you want. Ours is by influence, by knowledge of the brand, and what will be financially successful at the end of the day. So, it’s a question that has so many different facets to the answer. Knowing what the objectives and goals are of the developer and then coming to understand them as people and what makes them tick, what motivates them, is really important because as an influencer, you really have to understand the team and how they work and what they want to achieve. So, it’s multilayered and it’s complex. I’m often asked how does that work because it’s so different with every team, every region, every city, and you just have to embed yourself in it. Understand and then influence. I’ve gotten pretty good at that.

SSR: Would that be a recommendation too for the designers that you work with?

DK: Oh absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Know your client and communicate with them. Understand them. Communicate with them. That’s where the highest degree of success lies. If we said as an operator to an owner with fists pounding on the table, this is what we want, we wouldn’t be able to achieve it. You persuade people and with enough conviction in the product, most people come around. They see your point of view.

SSR: So 2008, you add on renovations. Let’s go back a little bit. Four Seasons has been known for luxury for years, but since 2008, and more recently, you’ve evolved what that definition of luxury means. Can you talk a little bit about what that progression has been like and what recently you have been focusing on?

DK: We had a huge milestone at about 2014, so about five years ago now. Actually, it was when the company turned 50 years old that the then-CEO Katie Taylor said, ‘We’ve had a lot of success but we can’t rest on our morals, we have to make ourselves relevant to the modern luxury traveler and what does that mean? What’s the next 50 years going to look like?’ She asked us to search for a thinktank that would be able to help us to take a deep look inside our success and to tell us how we can improve, to stay ahead of the competition.

Because when we started simple things like Mr. [Isadore] Sharp insisting that shampoo be included in the amenity setup, that hadn’t occurred before. That was a first. All of his little service touches were unknown and that was the foundation of the company’s success as well as our legendary service. At 50 years old, we had imitators around the world and some of them were doing a pretty good job, so we had to look at ourselves and see what we could do. That’s when we hired IDEO and went on that yearlong journey that resulted in a sanctuary room and the focus on human-centric design, which of course was right up my alley. That was a wonderful milestone, and it yielded so much for the company. I could go on forever about that, but there was some really serious global initiatives.

We ended up doing a product called Golden, which is sharing the profile of guests across the entire portfolio so that one of our frequent guests doesn’t have to repeatedly say, ‘I want cream in my coffee and not milk.’ He just gets the right coffee whether he’s in Asia or in the Middle East. Lots of the mobile app, the chat function, all of the things that we take for granted now float from that research we did. And then just recently, we looked again to see a pattern now—every once in a while you have to look to see how you can improve. We did a DNA, we termed it the DNA Project, which was to look again at what is in our DNA service-wise, product-wise. It was another fascinating and really exciting period. We did that with a New York company called eatbigfish.

Their logo is a small fish about to swallow a big fish because their point of view is that if you as a brand can find a vehicle to improve and be better and deliver better than your competition, you’re the little fish that can eat the big one. Interesting. And we came up with a remarkable framework for how to think about our guests. There’s a quote that we truly believe in the power of connections. Life is richer when you’re able to meaningfully connect to the place and the people around you. It sounds a bit self evident, but it is, in fact, an amazing framework.

So connections and character and craftsmanship came out of that research work. Connections between our guests and our people, connections between our guests and the environment, the city, or the landscape in which they are. And craftsmanship, all about designing to showcase our mixologists or chefs, or even our florists. So the idea of incorporating the florists shop or workshop right in the lobby, which we came up with as a unique idea, but simultaneously, so were others. So Tony Chi put a beautiful flower shop in the new Rosewood in Hong Kong. We did it for the first time in our hotel in Seoul, Korea. That’s about showcasing craftsmanship.

The last one is character, which has led to an incredible revival in our people and culture, about start with the heart, master your craft, and be you. It’s all about empowering our employees to once again truly be genuinely themselves. It spills over to so many other things, I can talk endlessly about this. Uniforms, for instance, have had a resurgence of a wardrobe based approach, one that allows people to choose items that they feel comfortable and beautiful in, because that allows them to be genuinely themselves. Their interactions with guests are better. So, yes, I don’t know what’s coming next but it looks like there’s a five-year cycle for reinventing ourselves so something new is coming soon.

SSR: No, but I think it’s so important to take a step back and look within and I think that speaks loudly to your recent success with Four Season and just the amazing design work that’s coming out the brand. So, talk a little bit for those listening that don’t know as much about the sanctuary guestroom, and on top of that from this last look in, how is that further affected design and what you touch everyday?

DK: The sanctuary room, an interesting designation, because it really suggests a refuge, a place to rejuvenate, recharge, an oasis of serenity. It helped us develop a real language and approach to how we design. So, sleep temple, again self-evident, and all these sort of pseudo religious overtones are on purpose because a temple of sleep. Imagine what that means. That really says to designers, design it so that it communicates to the guests when the walk into the room that we’re really serious about gibing you a great night’s sleep.

We’re going to make sure that all the outlets that you need to control the room are within reach, that you have light where you want it, that you have peace of mind when you go to sleep and you really have a great sleep. The wind-down zone, interesting, the genesis of that was from the neuroscientist that was on the IDEO team. His research led him to conclude that if you gave a guest a place to wind down after their busy day, with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, rather than just jumping into the bed, that you actually got a better of rest once you did retire into the bed. The wind-down zone.

And then activity table. That was when we took the bold step of saying desks are telling guests they have to work in their room. What is we provided just a comfortable place for them to sit, still at the right height with a lumbar support and ergonomically appropriate chair, but not an office chair. What if the desk became a round table? Still a surface for you write on if you’re old school analog and still carry around paper and pens, but at the same time, you could dine at it, or you could have your morning coffee at this table. So that was the genesis of the media wall and the activity table.

Then of course oasis bathroom. Natural light. Again, the scientists on the IDEO team said people have a sense of wellbeing that starts in the morning when they groom in natural light and that carries with them. So that lathered up to an incredible set of design guidelines for us, which we’ve been following and still do. And in terms of the new DNA work, connections is really an important part of it. Simple examples: We used to design reception desks that were bracketed by walls, so if you wanted to have a closer interaction with guests, you’d have to bolt over top of it or run around through the back of house. Now we have modular pods; two person or three person. But they’re open on either end, so that there’s a greater ability to connect.

When you approach someone, there’s a kind of energy that happens, and so we’re looking at the design of all of our elements to really showcase the mastery of our craftsman, and to provide the ability for greater human connections. A lot of its been done before in terms of show kitchens, but a lot of them are behind glass and again, no real connection. We’re even looking at designing bars in a way that people can basically circumambulate and be on the side of the mixologist rather than just across a barrier. So yes, all of these ideas inform how we design.

SSR: I think it’s just extending to what hospitality should be. Right? You’re getting back to kind of the basics and being with people and serving people on kind of a more gracious homelike setting.

DK: You’re absolutely right. There was a formality that crept into hotel design that we are carefully deconstructing in the service of that, of providing really genuine personal service. Because when you think about it, you’re right, that is what hospitality means and that is what guest expect. But if you’re designing barriers into every interaction, then it’s self defeating. Fascinating stuff.

SSR: On top of that, you also have a research and design studio here in your office that you can test things and set things up. I had a great time playing in it with you. I mean, you have everything from the robes to how table settings are for each restaurant. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s helped also evolve the brand?

DK: It’s unbelievable. When I think back to the times when I had cutlery and chinaware in my office, and we’d try to figure out whether this line of cutlery was appropriate with that, sometimes people would appear in my office with a random sample and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ My question is always ‘What does it go with? Where does it belong? Let’s see it in the right light.’ We have the great luxury of being able to do that now. So when we set up table top, we actually have all of the pieces and napkins, cutlery, chinaware, glassware, goes without saying, but we also set up the mannequin in the uniforms of the restaurant. We have menus and the collateral, and we see it all holistically. That has made a huge difference in how we’ve evolved to, I think, the most thoughtful and intelligent way of reviewing things.

We’ve got the food and beverage platform, which by the way has become wildly popular in the building. Every birthday, every wedding shower, baby shower, it’s all there. The greatest compliment I got is when we were just setting it up, it was just finishing construction, and chef from our diner came up, and his great French accent, which I won’t do because I’m not good at. I asked him, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I want to move in here and live here.’ That was a real compliment.

We have a plumbing testing wall. We have a library. We have a technology wall where we’re currently testing the wallpaper TVs, you know the ones that are paper thin. Just incredible resolution. We’re actually going to install those for the first time in our Park Lane London property. Amazing TVs. Now, in lieu of the cardboard room, which used to be my favorite part of the R&D studio, because we could for virtually no money, take our an X-Acto knife and mock something up and test it. We are in the process of building a fully working model room, one designed by Meyer Davis and it’s absolutely stunning. More to come on that. We’ll start construction likely in the new year.

Many reasons for doing that, including making sure that we have a fully working Lutron system for dimming and lighting and control. It’s so important to giving the guest the mastery of the room. Believe it or not, there are rooms still being built where people have to run around a room and turn off a table lamp and a standing lamp, and sometimes it’s not easy to find how to turn it on or off. It’s very frustrating, you don’t want to do that to a guest just before they lie down and try to get a good nights rest. Lutron will be in there. We’re going to test everything new in that room.

SSR: So two things, you mentioned Meyer Davis, who is a longtime collaborate with you and Four Seasons. For all the designers listening, what do you look for in a collaborator? How do you find designers for these various projects that you’re working on?

DK: We have a pretty set system of finding and pre-qualifying designers. And there are many routes to get to us. Sometimes, owners have hired a design team already, and we get to know designers. Sometimes, as with Meyer Davis, it was in your magazine that I saw an image of their work, and I was instantly smitten and reached out and spoke with Will. The rest is history.

They sometimes approach us, designers, sometimes it’s a real search. For instance, if there is an issue of any magazine with awards in it, I go through all of the award winners to make sure that we’ve captured everybody. Then, I’m really well-versed on what I call the splinter factions. You know that Yabu has ended up with long-time employees forming their own firms, Corinne, Paulo, and others. I know all of those teams. It’s a wonderful world, the design world. The opportunities are many, and we keep our finger on the pulse of the industry.

SSR: Also, you mentioned working with Isadore Sharp, who obviously is the founder of Four Seasons. What have you learned working with him for so many years?

DK: He’s my mentor. He’s magic. Have you ever seen him smile? It’s luminous, and you have to smile back. He’s amazing. An architect by training if you didn’t know that, at the Ryerson University here, which as been to my benefit, but sometimes, not so much so because you can’t bamboozle him. He really knows the business. Not just hospitality but architecture and design. So the way we’ve worked together for 21 years is that we share. He sometimes has different positions, but we share openly and he’s an amazing man. It’s a natural thing in his character to motivate people, and to be respectful and to listen. I think he’s the best boss in the world. I could not have hoped for anything more.

SSR: Is there one project that you recently opened, I know Philadelphia just opened, that really speaks to this new movement of Four Seasons and just for the listeners in here, we are in her office and she has an old drape that she found in archives of what Four Seasons was in the ”70s and it’s a beautiful green and flower piece, so you’ve come a long way. But is there something that really speaks to what you’ve been talking about in the new genesis of Four Seasons?

DK: So I can speak fully to the last inflection, the ideal stuff. We’ve had time to design and build and bring it to life. The DNA stuff is just starting, the connections, the character, and craftsmanship. But we’ve already written a couple of bulletins, one for urban properties and one for resorts about what all of that means. To be rolled out soon. It’s pretty pithy stuff. There’s a lot of substance to the last body of research.

And as for the drapery, that is a floral chintz drape that is about as in-your-face floral as you can imagine. We’re not about that anymore. There’s of course pattern and texture and color will always be en vogue, but when you think of sanctuary room, you can’t imagine a drape like that in it because it’s nervous making. You want a neutral and serene palette.

We find that the requests we get repeatedly for a splash of color in the room like, ‘Can’t we have a splash of color? Can’t we have a pillow with some color?’ It becomes much quieter, and you don’t get those requests when you deliver a design that has enough contrast in it. That has enough different textures and finishes. So matte against a high polish. You have enough visual interest, people don’t demand red pillows when you’ve got a really beautifully composed and curated environment for them. I keep the drapery to remind me of how far we’ve come.

SSR: Four Seasons is launching its own private jet, right? You guys are going into aviation. Are you involved in that at all?

DK: Oh I am. I am. Yes. We started, I think, if I’m not wrong, the first jet that we started flying was in 2014 or ’15. So we’ve been flying a jet for the last number of years. This one has so much hype because it’s a custom built one. So, Airbus is building it down to the last detail in collaboration with us. I tell you, that’s been a journey, pardon the pun. Aviation design has so many parameters. The fuselage is the fuselage. The certifications are brutal. You can’t put this with that because the flammability certification won’t be met. It’s a whole new world for me. When I stated in architecture, I thought that the building code was pretty restrictive and onerous, but the aviation safety certifications, they beat all.

SSR: Well it’s something new for you to try at least.

DK: Yes. Yes. And it’s been a lot of fun. The Airbus team, especially their chief designer, Sylvain Mariat, they’re amazing. They’re real pros. And so animated and passionate about design. Sylvain is featured in one of the videos and he calls the jet the ‘un palais dans le ciel,’ which is the ‘palace in the sky.’ He truly believes that’s what we’re supposed to deliver and we will.

SSR: So with all this that you have on your plate. You’ll be at 120 hotels, which is a lot for a smaller hotel company, how do you keep up with and keep competing against some of the disruptors in the industry like home sharing and co-living and coworking? How do you, as a team, keep up to date and keep trying to push the envelope in what you’re doing at Four Seasons?

DK: For sure we pay attention. We pay attention to even trends that don’t get fully formed because there might be a kernel of some wisdom there. We pay attention and when it’s right for us as a brand, then we’ll make a move. We aren’t the kind of company that goes running after trends. We’re very deliberate and starting with the guest and what the guest wants. And if we hear enough evidence and then we validate it, then we’ll make a move. So for instance, the activity tables, one of those things, there are many other disruptors and innovators out there who burn brightly for a while with some idea and then it doesn’t pass the test of time. So, we filter always through what does it mean to the guest experience? How does it enhance their stay? We land on some pretty solid ground.

SSR: One of the panels you did for me at HD Expo a couple years ago, you said you’re most excited about this time of hospitality and at Four Seasons that you’ve been in your career. What makes you get up everyday and love hospitality so much? What is it about this industry that keeps you going?

DK: I love this industry. Having been in others, I think one of the most amazing parts of it is that, it’s usually a happy experience being in a hotel. Definitely in a resort because you’re there for a reason which is to get away. There’s the romance of travel that comes with it. There’s the global reach of the company is very exciting, because we go to places that are sometimes new and untried as markets, and that appeals to me and that makes me in turn happy to be involved in it. I really love to see the metamorphosis in our renovations, and I really love to see plans come to life in the new builds. There’s something so, it’s really magical to see bricks-and-mortar that come out of an idea and to be able to influence those ideas is fascinating. It will never, ever leave me. I might retire at some point, but I’ll continue to be involved because it’s a fascinating world. None better.

SSR: That’s what’s kept us around. You and I. Thank you so much Dana. It was so lovely to chat with you today. Thanks for taking the time.

DK: Oh, the pleasure was all mine. It was wonderful to spend time with the two of you, and thank you.