Business 2.0 Magazine:
On a winter morning in San Francisco, I’m looking out my hotel window as the fog enveloping the Bay Bridge slowly dissipates. I’m enjoying the view - and everything else about my circumstances.
My room at the Hotel Vitale is sleek and modern without being too hip. The decor is understated, with high-end wood veneer and muted earth-tone furniture. There’s a flat-panel TV on the wall and limestone in the bathroom. The hotel spa has soaking tubs and a ‘secret garden,’ and there’s free yoga in the penthouse. The whole place seems lifted from the pages of a design magazine - which, as I’ll soon discover, is no accident.
The Hotel Vitale is the flagship of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the largest boutique hotelier in California. And Joie de Vivre is the brainchild of Chip Conley, a 46-year-old Stanford MBA whose approach to the business is unique: He thinks about the properties he develops as if he were a magazine editor.
‘Each of the 35 hotels we’ve done was based on 1 or 2 magazines and the five words that define their personality,’ Conley explains to me. ‘The Vitale was a hybrid of Dwell and Real Simple; the words were ‘modern,’ ‘urbane,’ ‘fresh,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘revitalizing.’
The idea may sound weird at first, but it seems to be working. As other boutique hotel outfits have fallen from the peak of fashion to the depths of been there, done that, Joie de Vivre is surging forward - with plans for expansion so ambitious that, unless Conley is careful, they could prove to be his undoing. Read more.
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