Hi all,
Hi my friends, hope you had a wonderful week. A quick reminder for the upcoming live next week, make sure you hit the reminder button.
And this week, I don’t have a framework for the letter. No special method and no checklist for you guys.
This week is more of a feeling and I start writing this one, September 28th at 11.23pm.
For the new people here, we don’t know each other yet, but I never studied anything regarding hospitality. Started in the tech industry back in 2010 and left Paris in 2015 to launch what we called “an entrepreneur residency” on the coast, in Brittany.
At this time, nothing related to hospitality at all. I thought we were running a startup as we were gathering tech guys under the same roof. I understood later that managing nights, food, cleaning, offsites, talks and transportation was way more connected to what a hotel is than an iOS app.
11 years later, I just realized that I work in a business where I’m supposed to care about what’s next. All the conversations I have, everyday, are about the next cool place, the next hotel everyone talks about, the next restaurant (the last text I had was this afternoon from my friend Seb talking about the Nautilus as the next big table in the region…). Anyways, you know that “you have to go there” energy.
And of course, I love that world.
From discovering places, with good design, from hotels and restaurants with a point of view. When you walk into this new address and you feel that someone cared too much.
But lately I’ve been wondering if the next big thing in hospitality might be to get quiet again. And when I say quiet, I don’t mean boring.
Quiet.
I swear there is a difference. And I like the quietness of where I live. Let me explain.
We’re living in a world where everything has to move fast. When you have a place that opens, everyone goes, posts, has an opinion and compares, and I did this beautiful exercice with my friends the other day: Would you take the free time you have tomorrow to go back to the address you went, or are you going to try the one you just saved on Instagram?
We all know that social networks made hospitality and places super visible and pretty sexy, which helped a lot of builders to exist. And this letter is not about nostalgia and being that guys pretending that everything was better before. We all know that visibility matters and that a great place needs to be found.
It’s just that the feeling I have is that it feels strage to have hospitality going just once.
I can’t say anymore if its once to post about, or once just to say you went there.
Where is the real feeling behind? What did you think about the spot?
I’m not sure places were meant to that.
When I go somewhere, I’m always talking about returning to. That’s the way I evaluate my feeling when visiting or going to a new address. As I said, I love to see that the staff remembers my kids names. As an example, with my wife we have this thing about white tablecloths, and if you go to Lipp for example, there is this table we love, the number 23. You can ask for it, its a table where you can sit side by side at the entrance, and our game is to eat yes, but mainly look at all the characters coming in.
Anyways, I don’t need the best food every week and I don’t need the best hotel every month. Most of the time we just need a place that holds a small part of our life properly. Just that.
That might be much harder to build than hype.
And I think we confuse attention with attachment
We test this on our own places. Frank’s Market, our coffee shop in Brittany, is the latest → https://lobby-studio.com/portfolio/franks-market
