At its core, hospitality is about making you feel like you’re being welcomed into someone’s house—you should forget you are in a hotel. My head of design, Verena Haller, knows she’s got it right when I walk into a hotel and take my shoes off. I come from an Indian background and it means I feel at home. 

The Manner, a hotel we launched in September 2024 in New York, is built around that premise: What kind of intimacy do you experience when staying with a great friend versus staying in a hotel? It starts with the location—the Manner looks like a beautiful residential building—and skipping the check-in process; you just get a key when you walk in. There are no TVs in the rooms and there’s a communal area with books about art, religion, philosophy, music, that come from my own collection. The goal is to reflect the complexity of someone’s personality, what their apartment might be like. Those details cannot be staged.  

Hospitality is not the same as the business of hospitality. Often in the hotel business, it is just about the operation: check-in and check-out times, when breakfast is served.… These are not set according to people’s lives but to follow convention, to make housekeeping more efficient. The business of hospitality is about conformity. It should be the opposite; it should be about individuality instead. It should be about the guest. 

Ultimately, a hotel should figure out its guests’ needs, instead of having the guests accommodate those of the hotel. It may sound simple, but it can be hard to execute.