Amar Lalvani is taking a risk by breaking the conventions of hotel aesthetics.
The Manner, which opened in Soho this fall, eschews predictable hotel room art — in fact, it has no art on the walls. There’s no time wasted checking in at a front desk. And, perhaps most controversially, there are no TVs in any of the 97 guest rooms.
“If you go to your good friend’s house, you aren’t going to waste your time in the room watching TV,” Amar Lavlani told NY Next.
Lavlani, who is President and Creative Director at The Hyatt following that company’s recent acquisition of his The Standard brand, said, “Some of the best days I have ever had is staying in a good friend’s home. That’s the feeling I’d like you to get here.”
Like at a friend’s house, the lobby has complimentary cocktails, snacks and books.
And even without art on the walls — Lalvani said the rich saffron paint palette is art itself — the Manner’s aesthetic is not stark or sterile. Rooms, designed by Hannes Peer, feature sumptuous velvet banquettes and leather bed frames, chandeliers and dimmable ambient lighting, and an integrated Dampf audio system.
“ ‘Luxury,’ in the traditional sense, is very uncomfortable,” Lalvani, 49, said of typical hotels with modernist lines sharp enough to cut or stuffy furniture that invokes fear of spilling something on grandma’s sofa. “To me, luxury is the actual opposite… where you can walk in the door, take your shoes off, relax and totally feel yourself and feel at home.”
For instance, Lalvani doesn’t like staff “hovering over” him when he checks in a hotel — so guests are encouraged to check in for their stay online, then simply collect their key from a discreetly tucked-away front desk.
He understands his biggest competition is not necessarily other hotels, but home rental platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Flipkey.
“I think the risk for our industry is that the next generation — my daughter’s generation — when they look to travel, they look to Airbnb first and then they look for a hotel,” Lalvani said of people renting out entire homes rather than single rooms. “The mindset has shifted. We’re kind of at risk because [hotels are] secondary in their mind.”
And it’s not just premium comfort and service that will win over the younger generation, it’s also about the perfect location.
Located in the old Sixty Soho (formerly 60 Thompson) hotel space, The Manner is tucked away on a quiet street — so you get a feel for what it would be like living in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the world — but also steps away from some of the city’s best shopping, restaurants and bars.
“The way I look at real estate is pretty opportunistic,” Lalvani said of the gut “feel” that drives him. “There’s the economics involved in it. But fundamentally, it’s a sense of place. Think about Soho. There’s nowhere like it … if you can get your hands on irreplaceable real estate, you do.”
Lalvani chose to base his business and settle down in NYC because “people move fast and get stuff done” here, after years traveling the world himself.
He started off working for billionaire Barry Sternlicht’s real estate investment firm Starwood Capitl Group, which owned the W and Le Méridien hotel chains before selling to Marriott. When Lalvani was just 22, he tagged along with Sternlicht on a work trip in Thailand; a few days in, the boss asked him to move there and oversee business in the region.
After two years in Thailand, Lalvani moved back to the US to attend Harvard Business School and then took a job in real estate development at Blackstone. From there, he jumped back to Starwood as global developer of the W brand and spent years bouncing around to far-flung locales like Doha, Istanbul and St. Petersburg.
“My whole my whole career has been about there’s been no plan — it’s stuff I like to do, people I like to work with,” Lalvani said.
He met Chateau Marmont hotelier André Balazs on a plane and ended up with a job, helping Balazs turn his then-nascent The Standard brand into a global enterprise. In 2013, Lalvani, with money from investors David Heller and Srettha Thavisin — an old friend from Thailand who later became that country’s prime minister — bought the company, expanding it to include the Bunkhouse Hotel in so-called second-tier cities like Austin and Louisville.
Several months ago, Lalvani sold the Standard brand to Hyatt for $150 million with an additional $185 million in store if they meet certain targets over the next few years. He’s still in charge of the Hyatt’s new lifestyle group, but this move freed him to jump from real estate to design; he calls The Manner his passion project.
Being an actual hotelier and not just an exec, Lalvani found, encapsulates his many interests: “It’s architecture design, it’s music, it’s culture, it’s fashion, it’s food. It’s everything I enjoy.
“I think I’m really lucky … I just create stuff that I enjoy and I hope that other people enjoy it, too.”
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
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