This is the look and feel of the 2020s. Enveloping, soft, spacious, secure, warm, rich, very here for you. The Upholstered Decade. I name it for the material because the material beautifully conveys what we seek from our spaces: big. cocoon. energy.

We love to wrap every interior surface a body might brush against in something soft enough to absorb discomfort of any kind. In this era, even a solid wall is clad — in warm wood, or better yet, suede.

The Upholstered Decade is the first design movement in centuries that is not a proxy for self-image. Every prior era was in conversation with a self-image. This one is in conversation with the body, more specifically the nervous system (as last week’s essay argued).

Here’s what every major design era before us was doing.

An abridged version:

Neoclassicism communicated authority. The post-revolutionary West needed its new governments, its new banks, and its new museums to look like they would preserve trust and guard assets. Columns and pediments were a civic argument that a hierarchy of power was now in place, and that the new orders deserved gravity. The British Museum, the Bank of England, the U.S. Capitol — each one asking its citizens, will you treat this republic with the seriousness it requires to prosper?

Art Deco in turn communicated prosperity. The 1920s had won, and all that winning needed a visual language. Polished steel, lacquered black, gilded edges, exotic woods. The brag of a class and a continent that had built sophisticated machines and invented speed. The Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, the Queen Mary’s first-class smoking room — each one asking the visitor, can you meet the sophistication of this much excellence?

Then the Depression came, and the war after it, and decorative arts and embellishment started to look obscene.

Modernism replaced ornament with utilitarian silhouette. The Bauhaus and the International Style taught a generation that the outline of the form was the design, and ornament was almost gauche. Discerning strong from weak composition became the measure of personal taste. Pragmatism was moralized. The empty wall was proof you were confident enough to be informed, unsentimental, and possessed of taste. The Barcelona chair, the Tugendhat House, the Farnsworth — each one asking, are you stoic enough to live without flourish?

Postmodernism reintroduced reference. The Modernists had deprived us of irreverence, and within a generation we were back to being silly. Zanini, Sottsass and the Memphis Group, Gehry's Bilbao — the educated mind playing with itself in public. In the 1980s, Karl Lagerfeld famously committed to the bit for an apartment he owned in Monte Carlo. This era asked, do you get it?

Kinfolk was almost a theatrical renunciation. By the early 2010s the creative class had decided the appropriate response to digital saturation was to pretend it could be opted out of, and the aesthetic was a cosplay of restraint and maturity — like someone just back from CDMX for the first time. The spartan shelves with one farm-to-table cook book and a hand-thrown ceramic that sparked joy.

In this era, everything was whittled down to almost Amish proportions in order to demonstrate that we savored life’s simple things. We were asked, are you mature enough to keep less and remain nourished? For me it felt like the last decade we believed we had an answer to absolutely anything.

Each of these eras was a faithful expression of what its moment valued, feared, and aspired to. The committed republican. The polished arriviste. The disciplined modern. The educated ironist. The mature renouncer. Design was always asking who you wanted to be, or wanted to say you were.

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The Upholstered Decade just needs you to show up.

Notice what the deeply plush, burgundy room does not ask. It does not ask you to be a serious citizen, a successful one, a moral one, a smart one, a wise one. The room demands nothing of the person inside it. It works on you while you sit in it, just so you can exist in it long enough to be a paying customer.

The deep upholstery absorbs sound. The mohair absorbs light. The color drench eliminates the visual contrast that keeps the eye scanning. Exhale. Stay long enough to consider ordering martini service.

You cannot argue a body into relaxing. You cannot lecture a nervous system into settlement. You can only build a room that does some of that work for the guest, rewarding them for leaving their house. We spend more freely when we are relaxed, when our grip on time has loosened. The economics of upholstery are also somatic.

Commitment.

All of these designers share the same instinct: to build a room so committed to its own universe that body state has nowhere to go but with it. The formula varies — color drenching, tonal color fields, cinematic lighting schemes, and ceilings designed as richly as floors. The end effect is suspension of disbelief. You surrender—I want a cigarette, I don't even smoke.

Anywhere a body has to spend time will eventually be redesigned around a single question. What does my nervous system need in order to inhabit, without strain, whoever I have come here to be? That is the question every era before us was too busy with self-image to ask.

Yes — selecting your environment is still a self-image act. But in this decade, the spaces that get chosen have more than image to deliver.

I notice this in my own body now, in a way I did not when I started writing about it. I used to walk into a beautifully designed restaurant and assess its every detail. The layout, the tiles, the lighting choices, the chairs. I google the designer...

Now the first thing I notice is how quickly I’m able to unhinge. I ask myself, “Can I truly unravel here in leisure with not one, but two martinis?” When the environment is somatically comfortable, the vibes come on fast. And if it is not that, I would rather be home. Only after I have decided I am at ease, can we discuss the glassware.

I am not the only person making this distinction. We are all doing it. But we will say a place feels good. We say we like the vibe. We say we would definitely go back.

Ten years ago, a pill box was a trending Amazon product — proof that a younger generation was getting serious about supplements. Today it’s a best-selling, TikTok viral, $430 art piece for the home, sold and contextualized beautifully by LES Collection, whose founder is fully committed to art-forward, intentional living.

LES Collection x Anastasio Home Pill Box

Photography by LES Collection

In the last five years, the art of a ritual has slowly become a nicely-funded aesthetic category in consumer goods too — Crown Affair, Flamingo Estate, Ghia, Aesop, Vyrao, Maude. Having spent this time developing supporting characters for said rituals — trays, vessels, boxes galore via my brand Anastasio Home — I can tell you in great detail why a thick marble bowl is grounding and why the sight of stacked Tupperware sets my adrenals aflame.

The dominant read on ritual brands is that they surfaced because people wanted to slow down. Pandemic, burnout, digital overwhelm — a break was needed, and candles and matcha and skincare and hair care became the break. That read is true, but shallow. Slowness has been sold continuously to American consumers since the 1970s. What is new is what slowness now requires.

The scarce resource today is a body that can settle itself down.

Work-from-home dissolved the edges between labor and life. The phone fragmented attention into six-second pieces. The group chat moved touch-bases into every waking hour. Somewhere in there, the things that used to regulate us — like the walk to the train, subway rides with no service, the evening that was quiet because it could not be otherwise — disappeared. An entire generation of nervous systems woke up one morning with no external scaffolding for state change, and they have been improvising ever since.

Simply put, ritual brands sell a surface. A physical footprint where a state change becomes not only possible, but justified.

The matcha routine is a fifteen-minute nervous system transition between waking up and logging on to work. The hair mask is a fifteen-minute transition between finally getting your kids to bed and launching into your cozy, evening scroll. What people are buying are cues, and perhaps permission. Physical, visible, domestic prompts that guide a depleted nervous system to the next state of being. This amounts to behavior design. The object becomes a crutch — or a much-appreciated aid — for a body that struggles to regulate itself from the inside.

I am saying this from inside the industry. When a hand-carved stone teacup weighing nearly a pound lands on a nightstand, the nervous system of the person who bought it does a specific thing. It transitions for turn-down. The object is doing the committal work before the tea is even poured. This is a visceral response is the combination of the object’s weight, density, intentional design, and luxurious surface. *Tutto a posto*, my mother would say. Everything is in place, I can feel it, I can let go, finally. We, geriatric millennials especially, cannot get enough of this feeling.

I did not arrive at this thesis through research. I arrived at it through five years of watching my own nervous system collapse under the weight of building a company while raising small children in a culture that has yet to place nervous system health on the same axis as mental health, physical health, sexual health, etc.

When I say the body is not fooled, I mean my body stopped being fooled. When I say we are buying cues because we cannot regulate from the inside, I mean I have not regulated from the inside in years and I rely on a few smartly placed vignettes in my home to stay on course. I am not claiming the stone tray or bowl is the solution. But I know the difference between a day that has no visible anchors in it and a day that has even one.

For the first time, consumers are not selecting home products only by how they photograph. They are selecting by how they make the nervous system feel in space and time.

The category is already assembling itself in adjacent corners of the market. Weighted blankets. Vagal nerve stimulators like Sensate and Apollo Neuro. The Moonbird breathing device. Acupressure mats. Fidget objects and coloring books for adults. Every one of these is selling the same underlying product: a nervous system that can settle itself down. These devices act directly on the body. Home objects do something adjacent — they build the visible scaffolding, the altars around which regulation is invited to happen.

Since the 2010s, wellness centered broadly on mental and physical health. For the late 2020s, wellness is becoming somatic.

In total service to the nervous system. And in some cases, spiritual-adjacent (different essay altogether!).

I posit that the first market for somatic goods will be formed by the ever-searching, geriatric millennial women flirting with perimenopause. We are somatically deprived, overstimulated, underslept, open to suggestion, and digitally articulate. We will generate the memes that become the language for the campaigns. Our complaints will design the products that go to market. Our dollars will build the category. In some ways, we already have. Alice, I’m looking at you.

We will be the first demographic to validate this market. We will not be the last. Not at the pace that technology is shaping us. So it’s a matter of time because wellness is already toeing the lines between addressing, measuring, analyzing, and regulating the nervous system, and the formula is still unclear. What can’t be measured, can’t be managed. What can’t be managed, can’t be solved. What can’t be solved, can’t be sold.

What looks like a new industry is the monetization of an old discipline.

It is the intuitive composition of daily life into a sequence of surfaces, vignettes, and small choices that make a household, a mind, and a body run without friction. The tray by the door that catches keys and the exhale of the day. Supplements out in a vessel you love to return to each morning. The coat hook by the door making your life smoother every day. This is the oldest form of systems design, and it has been underestimated for centuries as mere domesticity or *making a home*. Today, in my opinion, its use case has catapulted squarely into somatic regulation.

When we designed a coffee ritual set with Tania Sarin, I saw this principle at work in her beautiful home, also adored by the internet. It’s not just the interior design and styling. It is the evidence of Tania’s disciplined eye — uncluttered, directional, committed, and structured for intimate hosting.

Hosting, and more specifically coffee service, in her world, are reason for intimacy. Which, in 2026, is more likely to occur when compelling objects or products are introduced. The communal activity our grandmothers did without comment is something we now architect from a place of beauty and visceral joy, using accessories we return to because they make us feel a way.

For many of us, surfaces are externalized cognition.

Out of sight means out of mind, fully and without exception. A book on a shelf does not exist. A vitamin in a drawer does not exist. A ritual that cannot be seen will not be practiced. As a young family, my own home is structured more than it is styled (those styling days are on pause). Every surface prompts the next task for a smooth morning, bedtime, and bath time. The various unlit candles sing my name when I have the house to myself long enough to set them alight. An empty bowl on the table reminds me we need more fiber in the house, stat. A tray on my nightstand is my contract with the next morning.

A lot of people buying ritual brands right now — stated neurodivergent or not — are using objects to do what their attention will not. We are running on fragmented focus and outsourced cognition. Our surfaces are doing the remembering for us. This is not a moral failure. It is a material condition of our times.

This past January, we designed a hand-carved stone cup and saucer for Crown Affair’s ritual overnight serum launch. Thick, satin-polished, muted in tone, heavy enough to slow the hand that held it. Each piece took long hours of hand labor at our atelier in Rajasthan — a lot of hands, real hours, real human skill embedded in the object. The set sold out across Crown Affair and Goop in record time despite premium pricing. What buyers felt when the object arrived was density. The particular weight of a thing made slowly, by a human hand, and challenging to find on the market, perhaps for its perceived frivolousness. Crown Affair has coined the ritual positioning more successfully than any brand in the last five years because they have never once confused the mood for the mechanism. Dianna Cohen understands — at the level of muscle memory — that the job of a ritual object is to do something to the body and the mind, not only to look like something on a shelf.

The next decade of home design will sell premium behavior outcomes, not just taste.

For the last decade, the industry sold palettes, silhouettes, and moods. The next decade will sell what those palettes and silhouettes are actually doing to the people who live with them. Every object in a well-composed home is an invitation to act a certain way. A tray is an altar to the skincare routine. A shelf of books entices you to seek knowledge. The vessel on the counter is the reason the ritual, or nourishing habit, happens. Nourishing habits are paramount to system regulation, therefore the objects that keep returning to them are too.

Hospitality brands have been engineering this at property scale for a century. Auberge, Aman, Four Seasons, Rosewood — all of them have long understood that a guest’s nervous system is the actual guest. The home category is now catching up, at object scale, to what hospitality has always known.

Ritual brands exploded because they packaged this framing before the rest of their industry had a name for it. What most may not register yet is that this is not a single category among many. This is the underlying logic of how people want (desperately need) to feel inside their homes. The brands that win the next ten years will be the ones whose objects do the fastest, most honest, most legible work on a human nervous system. Beauty alone will not be the selector. The body will.

Call it somatic design. A consumer, a category, and an era. The people who understand this now will build the homes, furniture lines, and lifestyle systems of the next decade.

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I am in this industry because I believe in what a well-made, beautiful product can do for a body and mind that is overwhelmed by its daily obligations. If that sounds overly sentimental for an inanimate object, I can live with that. The ritual economy is not an aesthetic trend. It is a generation of people — most of them women, most of them tired, most of them trying to build a life that feels stable — reaching for tools and reasons that beg them to settle the flock

down.

I remember my first hotel bar date in the West Village—The Crosby. My, my, my, was I feeling myself. If they sold a 24-hour lip stain, I’d have bought two.

Equally vivid are the 16 nights I spent at The Wynn in Las Vegas—six months pregnant, and between two Lady Gaga press events involving back to back concerts and helicopters. I was not feeling myself then. But I became so attached to the Wynn’s boundless and theatrical hospitality that I ordered a full set of down pillows in two sizes before I check-out. They were waiting for me at home!

Most lifestyle brands spend millions to manufacture the kind of emotional attachment that hotels evoke so effortlessly. So why do so many hotel groups treat e-commerce like an afterthought? Why not sell something with sentiment?

The Pendry Manhattan West is where I hid away to write the business plan for Anastasio Home. I became a regular there towards the end of the pandemic, and this is a selfie I took in my first complimentary room upgrade. It was so special.

(and just after I took this selfie below, I landed my first retailer for Anastasio Home. It was a very memorable stay. )

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I recently stayed at a classic all-inclusive resort in Mexico. You know the kind—fanned-out like a low-rise cruise ship, buffets on rotation, drinks garnished with whole pineapples, and towel animals staring you down at turn-down. The interiors were not particularly refined. The clientele was not particularly design-forward. But the food was excellent. And the service was abundant, gracious, warm, and ever-present.

There’s something blissfully human about these places. They invite you to let go—not in the curated, Instagram-optimized way—but in the real, deeply restorative, perform-a-karaoke-song-during-Mexican-Heritage-night kind of way. (Yes, it happened. Pink Pony Club.) Would I have ever gotten up on that stage if the resort had been more design-minded, more “tasteful,” more me? Hell to the no.

Design, especially in luxury hospitality, often asks us to self-regulate. We happily dress the part and play along. But some of the most joyful, self-abandoning moments require a space that isn’t perfectly restrained. What would it look like to design retreats that prioritize irreverence, corniness and anonymity? Like scaling members-only clubs, perhaps it’s a fool’s game?

Because here’s the truth that is hardly a secret: a lot of very cool, aesthetically literate people LOVE these kinds of places. Not despite the lack of design credibility—but because of it. There’s a softness in being somewhere that asks nothing of your image.

As we dream up the next evolution of hotels, maybe we don’t need more spaces that look like design magazines. Maybe we need more that feel like a safe permission slip to be messy, ridiculous, joyful, anonymous, and human.

What would a design-forward hotel look like if it prioritized liberation over polish?

They are, without a doubt, spectacles. In their launch phase, they tend to price themselves parallel to a 5-Star legacy property.

But as I checked into one recently in New York, I was most certainly baited by the hotel’s shiny, sexy look. The service was mid, as the kids say.

While the space itself was arresting—it wasn’t actually owning my experience with anything beyond its color palette.

At $975 per night, I wondered, Where is the dialogue between guest and space? How will this last? Is it even supposed to?

Maybe in these types of hotels, the experience is designed to be one and done—meaning that the concept is meant to run for a decade under one name, capturing just the high paying, first-time guests before evolving into something else entirely, absorbing the next trend cycle.

Or, it could be that this is a case of a hospitality concept that prioritized visual impact—but didn’t fully consider what keeps people engaged beyond aesthetics.

The TikTok Era of Hospitality

This disconnect reminds me of the shift from Instagram to TikTok.

Instagram was built for polished aspiration. It rewarded broad, aesthetic appeal—things that looked expensive, styled, and just vague enough to be admired by anyone.

TikTok, on the other hand, thrives on specificity. It creates personalized worlds by linking highly niche interests, drawing people into micro-communities of shared knowledge and passion.

And hospitality, at its best, follows the same principle:

• The most powerful experiences aren’t just beautiful—they feel like they were created for you.

• A hotel isn’t just a space to exist within—it’s an environment that speaks to you in specific ways.

Right now, too many hotels are playing by the old Instagram rules, curating for mass admiration instead of personal connection. But in the post-TikTok world, hospitality should perhaps evolve into something less aspirational, and more intentional.

The hotels that figure this out first will own the next decade of luxury travel.

BAITED

I don’t mean that every hotel should over-explain itself. Some places are designed to be enigmatic, open-ended, atmospheric. But when a hotel communicates so boldly through its design language, I expect it to continue that caliber of execution through the rest of the experience, either in service, or if not service, then some other x-factor that surprises and delights, especially at a price tag upwards of $800 per night.

The service overall was ok—but it didn’t feel overwhelmingly predictive, intuitive, or tailored. I also didn’t sense that they were collecting my guest preferences along the way to add to a long-term CRM database meant to retain me for life.

(The last time I visited The Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas (2024), they asked if I still needed to avoid unpasteurized cheeses and have extra side pillows sent to my room (a note from a stay in 2019 when I was pregnant).

In this place, it all worked just enough. Just enough to lure me in for an exploratory first stay.

But just enough doesn’t create deep loyalty. I’m not convinced that I’d come again for anything other than a mid-week cocktail and a selfie.

Where This Concept Could Go Next

If these hotels are, in fact, designed for the short-term experience rather than long-term legacy, that’s an interesting model. Because what I spent at the design-bait hotel in 3 days is within the range of what I’d spend returning to a nearby hotel with mid-design at half the price, four times in a year.

If the goal however is to create something more lasting, here’s how these spaces could build upon their already strong foundation:

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Author’s Note

There’s a moment just before knowing.
Before the idea becomes language. Before the solution reveals itself.
It’s not logical. It’s not evidence-based. It’s just—there.

Designers and creative entrepreneurs know this place well (I’m here now). We call it intuition. But what if what we call intuition is actually a kind of quantum sensitivity? A form of tapping-in, not guessing. A way of receiving information that logic hasn’t caught up to yet.

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Superposition and the Designer’s Eye

In quantum physics, particles exist in multiple states until observed.

Designers are uniquely comfortable with letting things be more than one thing at once—sometimes forever.

We bring in objects without requiring immediate purpose. A marble bowl doesn’t need to justify itself. It will integrate. It will find its role. Or it won’t. That’s not the point.

In design, objects have multitudes:
A light is a sculpture until it’s turned on.
A table is both altar and workspace until someone claims it.
A space is gallery and sanctuary until someone enters.

In Anastasio Home’s retail showroom, people often ask: What would I use this for?
As if function must come first (lol, silly)
But design doesn’t always serve need—it responds to resonance.
And sometimes, beauty is the function.

Intuition allows us to recognize potential without collapsing it into certainty.

Share The Lobby

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To own one is to possess a tiny, tangible piece of a world that is otherwise fleeting—the hushed luxury of a Parisian suite, the louche allure of a private club, the irreverent daytime buzz by the pool, interrupted briefly by Rob Lowe lounging to your left.

Some of these objects are purchasable these days (which may mute the mystique a bit, but alas…revenue streams). If not purchased outright, most are acquired through more creative means. Either way, they endure long after checkout.

1. The Ritz Paris Bathrobe

No item is more tempting to “accidentally” leave in one’s luggage than the bathrobe at the Ritz Paris. It is, in every way, a distillation of old money discretion—a whisper-soft cocoon of thick terry, edged in navy piping, its embroidered insignia small but self-assured. To wear it at home is to momentarily believe one has just returned from an afternoon of handling estate matters. The Ritz, of course, now sells them.

2. The Stork Club: An Iconic Ashtray of its Time

In the golden age of New York nightlife, no place wielded cultural cachet quite like The Stork Club. From the 1920s through the 1960s, it was the ultimate power room—where movie stars, socialites, and politicians held court over martinis and cigars, all under the watchful eye of owner Sherman Billingsley. But for those who couldn’t secure a coveted table, there was another way to claim a piece of the club’s mystique: its ashtrays.

The Stork Club’s ashtrays—simple, Art Deco meets Gotham, emblazoned with the club’s signature stork logo—became one of the most stolen objects in nightlife history. They weren’t just functional; they were status symbols, a wink to those who knew exactly where you’d been the night before. Today, they’re highly collectible, showing up at auctions, vintage dealers, and on the shelves of those who appreciate the golden era of glamour.

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3. The Bespoke Trudon Candle at Hotel Costes

There are hotel scents, and then there is the hotel scent—the one that hits you at the door like a velvet-gloved hand to the face.

Costes in Paris perfected this with their Trudon collaboration, a candle that smells like deep red roses, polished wood, and the echo of whispered indiscretions. The fragrance is so intertwined with the hotel’s je ne sais quoi that burning it in one’s home can feel vaguely aspirational, as though you might look up from your evening drink and find a peroxide-blonde heiress smoking in the corner.

4. The Château Marmont Key: The Ultimate Hollywood Souvenir

Some hotels give you a plastic key card. Château Marmont hands you a piece of mythology.

The hotel’s iconic brass room key, anchored by an oversized silk tassel, is more than just a way to get into your suite—it’s a relic of old Hollywood, when a hotel stay was more than transactional, and your room was a stage for whatever story you were living.

Over the years, these keys have quietly disappeared into the pockets of actors, musicians, and anyone lucky enough to spend a night inside L.A.’s most infamous hideaway. They became a low-key status symbol, a subtle flex that whispered I’ve been inside the gates.

Château eventually caught on and made the key available for purchase, but the original ones—the ones that walked—remain the ultimate souvenir. A reminder that some places aren’t just hotels. They’re institutions.

5. The Gramercy Park Hotel Room Key

Before its renovation, the Gramercy Park Hotel’s oversized brass room keys were objects of obsession. They weren’t even really “takeable” (though people tried), but they became symbols of a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, the property was so strict about these keys, it’s impossible to find a photo of one online (simpler times then). We do have below, however, the Gramery Park Hotel’s highly coveted park key that they would lend guests to open the gates at the actual Gramercy Park across the way. This key is perhaps one of the most covetable in all of New York City, available to very few local residents in the area.

The Cult of the Object

What makes a hotel object iconic? Certainly, design plays a role—but it is meaning that turns a thing into a legend. The best of these objects operate as quiet emissaries of a world just out of reach, carrying with them the weight of experience, the atmosphere of a room, the vibes of a moment so perfectly engineered it might as well have been scripted.

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My background is in the luxury watch industry, where I spent years developing custom objects—gifts, keepsakes, and design pieces that weren’t just promotional, but an extension of the brand’s heritage. I’ve always believed that nothing should exist with a brand’s name on it unless it’s worthy of being archived, and that philosophy still informs how I think about design today at Anastasio Home.

If you’ve smuggled—or, let’s say, acquired—a hotel object of note, I’d love to hear about it. Confessions welcome.

The Greenwich Hotel, New York City - N. Moore Penthouse

Unless you are a privately owned entity, like The Greenwich Hotel in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood - with actor Robert De Niro being one of its owners, along with other partners like Ira Drukier and Richard Born of BD Hotels - hotels are built by committee.

In my previous career as Director of Communications for a beautiful luxury watch brand, I chose this penthouse for a press preview and learned that this oil painting set into the cabinetry is by Robert De Niro’s father. I found this intimate and connecting detail so sweet, and it inevitably became the charming anecdote that sweetened every conversation I had with journalists in the space that day.

So, outside of these privately operated gems, a luxury property isn’t a single vision brought to life—it’s a negotiation between landowners, banks, investors, brand executives, developers, and designers, all with conflicting priorities. By the time a hotel reaches its opening day, the number of decisions made—often with little regard for guest experience—could fill a war room. The fact that any hotel feels cohesive, let alone transportive, is a miracle.

Who Really Builds a Hotel?

Luxury hotels exist at the intersection of financial strategy and sensory experience. But finance usually wins.

• The Investors: The ones writing the checks, often without fully understanding the product. Their main concerns: risk, ROI, and the liquidity of the asset. A hotel’s brand name, rather than its design, is often the key to securing their capital.

• The Hotel Group: The operator licensing its name to the project—often Four Seasons, Auberge, Rosewood, or another player with built-in credibility. Their power is significant, but their control is limited; most don’t own the properties they operate.

• The Developer: Balancing a pro forma that includes rising material costs, construction overruns, and debt financing, they’re under pressure to hit a financial target. The first thing to get cut? Any design detail that doesn’t have a measurable impact on ADR (average daily rate).

• The Architect & Interior Designer: Tasked with translating a vision into a functional space, they navigate constant cost-cutting and approval layers. If they’re powerful enough, they fight back and preserve the design intent. If they’re not, they compromise.

Most hotels—especially new builds—end up being a reflection of the financing rather than the vision. The ones that rise above do so because someone—whether a brand, a developer, or a designer—had enough leverage to protect the idea.

The Pendry ManhattanWest Hotel, New York City | Designed by Gachot Studios

The Hotels Getting It Right

Some hotels today are breaking through this cycle, not because they have bigger budgets, but because they have a more disciplined point of view.

1. AMAN GROUP | The Ultimate Brand Control

Aman isn’t just a hotel operator—it’s a real estate company, a product company, and a cultural force. Unlike most luxury brands, Aman doesn’t just attach its name to projects—it controls them, selecting development partners that align with its aesthetic and operational values.

If you follow the brilliant Nadine of The Stanza, you can learn more about the tumultuous change of hands Aman has withstood, and be even more impressed that its design and magic have (mostly) been preserved and even expanded all this time.

Aman, New York City

Its latest opening, Aman New York, is a case study in brand dominance. The group partnered with architect Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston, whose precision in spatial design has helped define Aman’s DNA for decades. The interiors, led by Kerry Hill Architects, stripped away the usual distractions of urban hospitality—no loud branding, no unnecessary clutter, just a very high-stakes exercise in restraint. It’s one of the few hotels where the word “sanctuary” isn’t just marketing copy; it’s built into the architecture. The fact that sanctuary in itself is such a high-priced commodity says everything we need to know about what is truly scarce for even the most privileged of consumers these days.

2. ROSEWOOD | The Rise of the Localized Luxury Hotel

If Aman’s strength is purity, Rosewood’s is adaptability. Rather than imposing a single aesthetic across all properties, Rosewood’s strategy is to embed itself in the cultural and architectural history of each location.

Rosewood São Paulo, Brazil (above)

At Rosewood São Paulo, developer Alexandre Allard enlisted Jean Nouvel to design the exteriors and Philippe Starck to craft interiors that merge the city’s modernist and colonial pasts. The result: a property that feels like a living part of São Paulo’s history, not a hotel forced onto its streets. This same principle is at play in the upcoming Rosewood Amsterdam, housed in a former courthouse, with interiors by Nicola Fontanella that honor the original structure rather than overwrite it.

Rosewood São Paulo, Brazil (above)

3. SIX SENSES | Sustainability as a Design Principle

Unlike many brands using sustainability as a PR tool, Six Senses embeds it into the design process from the outset. The group’s expansion into urban markets—starting with Six Senses Rome—is a shift from its traditional resort model, but it’s proving that sustainability and luxury don’t have to be at odds.

At the Rome property, designer Patricia Urquiola worked within the constraints of a UNESCO-listed building, stripping back layers of unnecessary restoration and allowing original materials to dictate the interiors. The hotel’s energy systems, waste processing, and even guest amenities are structured around minimizing impact. The result: a property where sustainability doesn’t feel like a trend but a foundational part of the experience.

Six Senses Rome, Italy (above)

Why This Matters (And Why I Care)

The best hotels don’t just have good design; they have design that survived. Every detail—from the weight of a key card to the placement of a single chair in a lobby—exists because someone fought to keep it there.

Growing up in an Italian family, I learned that hospitality wasn’t just a transaction—it was a sign of intelligence. The way you hosted guests, the ease with which you anticipated their needs, the effortlessness of the experience—all of it signaled the mastery of an elite social craft—awareness, elegance and savviness. Great hospitality is a language of its own, understood by those who knew how to read between the lines.

That’s why I created The Lobby. My background in artisanal product design, luxury communications, and branding has given me a front-row seat to how these spaces feel, what sets them apart—and how often they fall short. This newsletter is about dissecting the forces shaping luxury hospitality, from the boardroom to the lobby floor.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving into:

• Who are the hospitality groups, brands, and developers ushering in the new era of luxury nuance, and how are they doing it?

• How does luxury hospitality make one feel exactly, and why it’s valuable in 2025 to reveal deeply thoughtful design moments throughout guest experiences.

• Why brands should commission original art for their properties and not be caught dead ripping anyone off in today’s social media climate.

If you care about hospitality, not just as a business but as case study in culture, design, and economy, come meet me in The Lobby.

— Gabriela Anastasio

Founder, Anastasio Home

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