Meet Yourself Here
I’ve come to view hospitality not as self-care, but as self-discovery — because through my experiences of design, pace, and atmosphere, I’ve learned what I respond to, and by extension, who I am.
Sometimes that self recognition arrives unexpectedly, through encounter rather than introspection. Sometimes, it’s a place.
I often think about the first time I went to Hotel Bel-Air.
I was twenty-four. I didn’t yet know how to inhabit luxury comfortably. I moved through environments like that the way you move through a museum — careful, reverent, conscious of where to stand and how long to linger. I was used to being impressed. I wasn’t yet used to being held.
It was breakfast on a bright Los Angeles morning. Sunlight spilled across the banquettes, warm rather than blinding. The room moved slowly, as if time had been given permission to stretch. Without quite deciding to, I followed its lead. I ordered tea instead of coffee. I stopped scanning. I let the pace take me down instead of trying to rise to meet it.
Something unexpected happened. The caution fell away. My formality softened into comfort. I wasn’t trying to behave correctly anymore — for the first time, ever. I was simply there. The setting took over in a generous way. It showed me that slowness could feel pleasurable. That elevation didn’t require tension. That it could belong to me.
That wasn’t the first time a place showed me who I was — but it may have been the first time I noticed.
Years later in Mallorca, that recognition found me again, at a moment I needed it most. It was mid-August, and I was healing from a breakup, emerging from a season where I had been quietly outsourcing my own discernment — what I liked, what I wanted, what felt true.
By then, luxury was no longer novel. I sat down at the St. Regis hotel bar with a sense of ambivalence my younger self would have winced at. This wasn’t cynicism. It was distance — from my own sense of joy.
My girlfriends and I were chatting through our plans for the evening when I noticed it: the juxtaposition of a red leather barstool against a turquoise glass bar wall. Groundbreaking? Definitely not. But it cut through the noise instantly. I loved it. And in that small moment, I felt something return to me — my own eye, my own sense of taste. I spent the rest of the evening quietly pleased, grounded in myself again
These moments stay with me. They inspire me to believe in the importance of spaces that speak to our souls — to remember that, in a world of revolving-door trends, intentional design has the power to create a place that welcomes us home.
A place that says, “come, meet yourself here.”