To that end, when guests get here, we tell them about the artists and the creative inspiration behind each room, and give them a virtual tour on the computer. Then they pick and choose where they want to stay. It's the same with the amenities. When guests check in, we present them with a minibar bag that they customize. We have predefined lovers' bags, hangover bags, and movie bags, but we let them determine what's inside. We all prefer different things to eat, drink, or do; we all want to be treated as individuals. And what I want today may not be what I want tomorrow. Hotel Fox is the same way. Here, you have something to get inspired by.
This draws a diverse crowd: traveling students, chic couples from Milan or Barcelona, people with blue hair--and interestingly, we get a lot of businesspeople here. If they wake up in a corporate hotel every morning, they don't know if they're in Sydney, Berlin, or London. But when they wake up at Hotel Fox, they know exactly where they are."
With her paradoxical loves--minimalism and color, serenity and excitement--Lambert, 42, has made the San José, below, an unassuming Texas-meets-Zen oasis.
"When I bought the San José, the neighborhood was full of $30-a-night joints for junkies and hookers. People thought I was crazy. Fact is, I had no idea what I was doing, but in the end that was probably a good thing. We made it up as we went. I never wanted to force the hotel into something that it wasn't, so I let it organically grow into itself. For example, when we opened, we didn't have art for the rooms. I pulled poetry from used paperbacks and tacked it up in the bathrooms. I didn't realize that it would turn into a signature until people would take what I had put up and leave something else.
My lack of experience also helped us think of a new way to do service. People love our staff because we don't pick cookie-cutter, polite peons. We pick people with other passions, from band members to former Peace Corps workers. You should feel like you're among friends.
This helps us attract a lot of great visitors, but I especially love how many people we get from Austin. It's because we're a part of the community. We have an elite cycling team, we hold free concerts in our parking lot, and we work with the area's disadvantaged youths. We're also dog friendly, which usually works out until some Fido starts swimming in the pool. But hey, you can't be all things to all people."
Westman, 27, is in charge of creating Hard Rock Chicago's atmosphere using music, infusing an upscale hotel with the irreverence of rock 'n' roll.
"Yes, 'vibe manager' is my actual job title. Here's the story. Music is our key differentiation. It's normal for a record store or radio promotional company to be on top of the music industry, but for a hotel, it's hot. So we have to do things that are cool and unique to offer something the other hotels can't. When I started, there would be a melodic folk rocker playing in the lounge, but before his performance, the music spinning in our public spaces was new-metal acts. The transition to this folksy rock didn't make sense, making what I considered a pretty lame vibe. So I identified our performances and preprogrammed the music in our public spaces to avoid this kind of awkward transition of music styles.
I have to be on top of what artists are hitting next, what genres of music are about to be popular. You see a lot of hotels selling their lobby tunes on a CD. Well, if that's the average, then I'm going to get one of those hard-drive sticks, have them preprogrammed, and put those in the guest rooms. I also look for promotional opportunities we can do to create unique experiences. Like this week, I'm working on a CD-release party with Warner Bros. for the new Madonna album, Confessions on a Dance Floor. This is a vibe experience because it gives the media a cool perception of the Hard Rock, and if you think about it, an album-release event has nothing to do with a hotel.
Music is a common thread through life. It's my job to make sense of this place day to day based on who's staying here. We want people to walk through the door and say, 'This is truly cool, and I am definitely coming back.' "
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