Ash hotels want you to love American cities.

Providence, Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Richmond, specifically.

This weekend, I decided I can no longer look like a hungover college student at the airport. I’m not going to start wearing Khaite trousers, but I would like to announce that I found the best, comfiest travel outfit — these super soft, stretchy pants from J. Crew (I bought 6 months ago and just rediscovered them packing for a 24-hour trip), a SKIMS t-shirt bodysuit because I’ll get shot before I wear a bra on a plane, an oversized sweater (I actually think the right crewneck sweatshirt could work here), sock and New Balances.

Today’s letter includes:

• An interview with the creatives behind Ash, a New York-based hotel group

• A timely trip down memory lane, to New York’s Playboy Club

• My thoughts on the Tarte influencer trip taking over my social media feed (sloppy)

"There's a term called induced demand where people will travel–and I’m probably that type of traveler—because there’s a cool hotel. I’ll know nothing about the city but say 'Oh this hotel looks cool. It’s an amazing jumping off point for exploring the city.'" - Ari Heckman, co-founder of Ash

By the way, there are over 100 comments on my Q+A from Friday. I’m happy to continue answering in that thread when I have time.

NEWS:

• Kylie Jenner has begun to use the Glossier office moodboard method of promoting her fragrance, Cosmic. She also said it’s been YEARS in the works, and her cosmetic account, Kylie Cosmetics, commented on the post saying “after all these years she’s finally here.” The whole team wants you to know this project took YEARS.

  

  Glossier post vs. Kylie post

• Alex Cooper’s production studio, Unwell, will have a house at SXSW as well as a bar called “Big Al’s.” Currently, they have a waitlist for invites. The whole thing feels a little Coachella to me, but who knows.

• Two of ThingTesting’s employees left the team last week. Azora Zoe Paknad (who writes

  First Rodeo
  ) and Emma Apple Chozick (who has quickly blown up on TikTok) both wrote heartfelt posts about their last days on LinkedIn. Curious for what’s next for both of them and ThingTesting…

• The New York Times visited Sania’s Brow Bar. But Feed Me subscribers already read about that last week.

• Birth control pills without a prescription will be available on retail shelves for the first time in the U.S. this month.

• Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its “Possibilities Summit” for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students. What does DEI look like on Wall Street today? Anxious, fraught, and changing fast.From C-suites down, American finance is quietly reassessing its promises to level the playing field. The growing conservative assault on DEI, coupled with pockets of resentment among White employees, have executives moving to head off accusations of reverse discrimination. It’s not just Wall Street. In recent weeks, Zoom Video Communications Inc. cut its internal DEI team amid broader layoffs and Tesla Inc. removed language about minority workers from a regulatory filing.

• Why we’re willing to spend more on beauty products than ever before. $85 lip compacts! $50 lipsticks! $48 blush! And… they’re all selling!

• The whole Tarte influencer trip to Bora Bora is freaking me out a little. The private jets they all took scare me. I keep seeing videos of girls puking from drinking too much. And they are all swimming with their phones. It is really looking like a cosmetic brand for girls who wish MTV Spring Break still existed.

• Kreung Cambodia, a Cambodian food pop-up that started in 2016, is opening a brick and mortar location. Pop-ups have always been a part of New York’s restaurant scene, but over the past few years they have exploded — now Eater even publishes a weekly guide to pop-ups so you can keep track of them. At the end of last year, Connecticut-based Pop-Up Bagels raised $8mm to expand (and become less pop-up, more permanent bagels). Brooklyn’s popular French bakery L’Appartement 4F now has two locations after finding success on Instagram during the pandemic. I texted my friend Emily last night about the proliferation of pop-ups to get her take, because it’s usually good. “I think that your pop-up concept secures your personal brand and creates that cult following before you open a brick and mortar. Historically, the only way to secure restaurant investment was behind closed doors but it’s way more community-oriented now if you already have that built in support. I’d rather young creative people experiment than just work at Eleven Madison Park then open some fine dining bullshit.”

kreung_cambodia

A post shared by @kreung_cambodia

• Substack is getting crowded, but I’d argue that the most successful people on this platform are still the ones who have worked in newsrooms.

  carla lalli music
  is hosting a month-long recipe development course on her Substack this month (and contributors include other Substack writers!). This reminds me of
  Emilia Petrarca
  month-long “repair month” series. Both are pretty traditional magazine models, especially at places like Bon Appetit (where Lalli Music worked) and The Cut (where Petrarca worked). In other Substack news, OG
  Haley Nahman
  is back from maternity leave.

• Breitling buys former Playboy Club for $27mm. The deal comes amid a recent trend of luxury retailers buying their buildings. Kering, the French luxury group that owns Gucci, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, bought the retail portion of 715-717 Fifth Avenue for $963 million from Jeff Sutton and SL Green earlier this year. And that’s all great, but obviously I had to go down a Playboy Club hole and see how they used to advertise in New York Magazine:

Playboy Club ads in New York Magazine issues from the 70's and 80's.

• Grilling pizzas is a fantasy for many — perfect in theory, difficult to execute. Le Creuset has announced their entry into the outdoor category, with the Alpine Outdoor Skillet, Square Grill Basket and Pizza Pan – designed to deliver memorable meals wherever the adventure takes you. That’s fun, wish Brad Leone was still hot on the market. He would’ve been fun for this.

• Manhattan is getting teeny, tiny Whole Foods locations. Called Whole Foods Market Daily Shop, stores will range between 7,000 to 14,000 square feet – a fraction of Whole Foods stores, which average about 40,000 square feet.

• Morgan Wallen recorded a set at Abbey Road Studios. This guy.

• Zara’s homepage is taken over by Zara Hair. We knew haircare would be huge this year. The section in Sephora and Ulta expands week over week. I went to Target in Atlantic Terminal yesterday, and they moved the hair tool section from a weird side angle by the pharmacy to its own two-sided aisle. The six products Zara launched today were made in collaboration with world-renowned hairstylist Guido Palau. The candy-colored packaging was designed by Baron & Baron, who also designs packaging for Nars and Calvin Klein.

  

• A Hamptons mansion on the market for $38mm reportedly comes with a major problem from buyers. They can’t actually live there. That’s because real estate tycoon Harry Macklowe never got a certificate of occupancy, and the new owners won’t be legally allowed to move in. Hope they figure that out by Memorial Day!

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Ash hotels want you to immerse you in American cities.

Providence, Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Richmond, specifically.

Last weekend the Ash Hotel team invited me to visit one of their properties, so I took the Amtrak from Penn Station (New York) to Penn Station (Baltimore) to stay a night at Hotel Ulysses. The nine-story historic building Ulysses resides within was constructed in 1912 on a site formerly home to Mayor Latrobe—over 100 years later, the neighborhood still buzzes with personality. The hotel’s blue banners waving outside welcome guests with the distinct serif font that is on almost every piece of collateral inside — coaster, matchbooks, stationery.

I’ll say it: I don’t think much abut Baltimore! I have a core memory from the summer of 2003, walking around the Baltimore Aquarium when the power on the entire East Coast went out. That was scary. But otherwise, it was a stop on the Amtrak from New York to D.C. This trip was full of local crab restaurants, dive bars, and plenty of adventures within the walls of Ulysses. Almost everywhere we went, the locals knew that Ulysses was the hotel with the bars that everyone wanted to hang out at.

I’ve been curious about Ash hotels for a while. Initially because of the photos of the hotel rooms that always appeared on my Instagram feed (fantastical, lush, Wes Anderson meets Luis Buñuel, and just decadent). Then, because Xavier Donnelly (Le Dive, The Carlyle Hotel, Doubles in Amagansett) joined the team as Creative Director last year. And THEN, over the holidays I discovered their souvenir shop, filled with ice buckets, bright yellow umbrellas, and luxuriant bathrobes.

I spoke to Donnelly and Ash co-founder Ari Heckman about fantasizing American cities, their thoughts on wellness-focused hotels, and what they wished more people knew about the hotel industry, and included some photos I took during my stay.

The bath in our hotel room was pink, large, and places right between the bedroom and hanging out area.

For those unfamiliar with the group, how would you describe the mission and vision of your properties? What's your expertise that sets you apart from other hotel groups?

XD:  Ash hotels are historically and geographically contextual and designed to be cinematically immersive.  Created and developed by a small team, our hotels are the product of intensive research, collecting, and experimenting, and thus often deeply personal. Typically between 50-150 rooms, our hotels always include food and beverage outlets on property.

AH: We seek to create hotels that are really experiences, where everyone who enters becomes an actor in a film. We want you to feel totally transported, like an immersive adult theme park where you also get to sleep. We also want our hotels, despite being beautiful, to not take themselves too seriously. They are places for exploration and fun, akin to staying with your cool best friend.  They should be an ideal jumping off point for discovering a city, even if it’s your own.  We want to build into every guest’s experience a sort of treasure map and passport to our favorite places in each of our host cities.

Hand-beaded details filled the room, as well as plush quilts and heavy draperies. I slept 13 hours in that bed, for what it's worth.

Ari used to work in real estate, and Xavier used to work on interior design projects for all types of businesses. What is it like now working on design and branding at the scale of hotels?

XD: I love hotel projects because you have the opportunity to create a little world to which one can escape; one sleeps, eats, drinks in these places. Coming up with that experience - from the interiors to the scent to the music- is an exercise in storytelling and also just fun.

AH: I’d say the key is the fact that we control every decision and touchpoint, from what cities we choose, to what buildings we find, to the entire design scheme, brand, collateral, scent, guest experience, etc. Hotels are incredible (and hard) because they are very well-used and open 24 hours a day—the opposite of set it and forget it. But having control of all the inputs makes for a really holistic vision come to life.

I’m interested in how you pick your markets, and how you pick your properties in particular. What is that research process like? Do you have any elements of your hotels that repeat in all of the properties?

XD: It's not exactly a scientific process, but we are looking for cities where there's an inherent creative energy, enough demand, and where we feel our hotel could be additive to the community- but more than that we need to be able to fantasize about the place. Each hotel is unique, but we generally look for historic or architecturally significant properties in need of renovation. We try to build at least one restaurant and a couple of bars in each property.

AH: The market selection is an unscientific process with some discipline and rigor. We have our ear to the street and a robust network of interesting friends and colleagues so sometimes we hear enough about a certain place that compels us to visit and see if it could be a fit. I generally say I’m less interested in cities that already have hotels I want to stay in, although sometimes there’s an opportunity to make those hotels better. Once a place is of interest, we do a lot of analysis of the demand drivers, competition, etc. In terms of repeating motifs, they all follow a similar jumping off point in terms of fusing inspiration from a bunch of different sources.  We keep building threads between the properties, whether in our beloved Ash personal care (launching for sale soon!) or color schemes or our restaurant Ash—Bar.

Some of the cities your hotels are in definitely seem like they're in a bit of a transition, at least culturally and in regards to tourism and it seems like you've figured out the math of acquiring some of these buildings. Would you say you have somewhat of a downtown revitalization thesis?

XD: I think in our most idealistic vision, a hotel we open would be an integral part of the growth or revitalization of a city or a neighborhood.  Of course these things are always the sum of their parts, but I do think we've been a contributing factor.

AH: Generally yes, we believe in cities.  We think the most exciting culture movements are born in cities, cities ignite imagination and creation.  That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t consider doing non-urban projects, but we love the concept of a hotel as the embassy for a city, a place where locals and out-of-towners can exchange ideas and collaborate.

I keep reading about wellness tourism, and spa/wellness-focused hotels. What are your thoughts on that?

XD: I think "wellness" can mean many things, and I think our hotels offer a mix of discovery and escape, which I personally find revitalizing! That being said I'd love to build a spa or bathhouse focused hotel!

AH: When they’re done well, they’re amazing!  I think the issue with any trend is that it quickly gets diluted or bastardized. The good ones will last.

What is something you wished we all knew about hotels? How do we become better travelers?

XD: This is specific to Ash hotels, maybe, but furnishing the spaces is a literally globe-spanning endeavor.  This past year we've shopped for antiques in France, bought vintage textiles from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, and done quality checks on furniture prototypes in Vietnam and Mexico.  It all becomes part of the story of the hotel.  In my opinion the best travelers, and the ones that have the most fun, are those that are unendingly curious.

AH: Hotels are staffed by locals!  And they have really good tips on everything, often way below the surface.  If they work at a hotel, chances are they are thrilled to answer your questions.

Who do you admire — dead or alive — most in hospitality/ design?

XD: I'm forever obsessed with the duo artist Antoni Miralda chef Montse Guillén who opened El Internacional in 80's Tribeca as a hybrid experimental art project and restaurant.  Pure freedom and fun.

AH: I think it would be really interesting to have dinner with Walt Disney. He did something totally new and long lasting.

What's on your travel bucket list?

XD: So many places.  Hoping to go soon on a long trip to India and to Tangiers

AH: I have to say I agree with Xavier (as usual) – India is very high, Morocco. Also Beirut, Istanbul, Rio/Sao Paolo. Too many places and too little time.

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See you tomorrow!