Jennifer Rubell, Doug Herrick, Peter Schweizer: "It’s got to be comfortable"

Art Design Publicity magazine 2(2): Micro | Re-published 29 July 2010.
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Jennifer Rubell is adamant. "It’s shocking what’s going on," she says. "There are several hotels in New York that are really all about marketing. You can feel it, and it doesn’t feel right. I don’t know about South Beach though. We’ve had one wave of hotels here, and the second wave isn’t open yet, so we’ll see. I know that most people involved in the second wave are approaching the situation sincerely, but some aren’t. I wake up in the morning thinking about hotels and go to sleep at night thinking about hotels. I’m interested in making them feel more appropriate to most people’s lives," says Rubell. "But I approach a hotel without thinking of the marketing potential of the people involved, and I don’t consider ours to be ’designer hotels’, because I’m interested in other aspects of the business. Our hotels are ’designed’ in a certain way, but my home is also ’designed’ in a certain way. The media is interested in people thinking about the world in a new and innovative way. If you’re doing a ’designy’ hotel because you opened Hotels Magazine and read that designer hotels are hot, and then hired a designer that you think is hot, you’re doing it for externally imposed reasons," continues Rubell passionately. "Then you are not media worthy–you’re not really worthy at all." Are lobbies sometimes designed to fill a sexy press release? For Peter Schweitzer, "Sure. They try too hard, stick too much in there. Eventually people don’t care."

What about celebrity publicity? Is it important to a hotel’s success? Jennifer Rubell says, "Dealing with celebrities in that way and building your profile based on celebrities has nothing to do with creating a home for people. A home is a haven. The people I’m interested in are definitely not ’celebrities’, though many are leaders in their given industry. It depends on what you believe in. In my opinion," she continues, "when you provide accommodations for leaders of industry, you’re building a base and developing grass roots support for the hotel. In the case of celebrities, the purpose is to pull in the general audience. To me, that’s a shallow, risky undertaking."

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