How ‘Sinking of the Ships’ created powerful design for Marriott

LOS ANGELES - Marriott International CEO Tony Capuano distinctly remembers an important lesson about the power of authenticity and localization in hotel design.

It was after Marriott purchased its initial stake in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. in 1995. He remembered the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua at a time when there was a much more formulaic approach to interior design.

“When we inherited that hotel, once you walked inside if you didn’t look outside at the beautiful Pacific Ocean, you would have thought you were at Buckhead [in Atlanta]. It was the same carpet and oil paintings of clipper ships and fox hunts. There was no local sense of place.”

That’s where Javier Cano comes in. He’s currently an area general manager in Los Angeles for the company, but he was the GM of the Kapalua property at the time. And the hotel developed a plan to localize the art it used.

“Under Javier Cano’s leadership, he started a program called the “Sinking of the Ships.” He engaged with local artisans,” Capuano said. “And every Friday, we would do a reception for the local community. And they would, in a ceremonial way, take down one of those clipper ship paintings and start to hang local Hawaiian art.”

He said that kind of approach, through authenticity and localization, can help hotels develop a distinctive approach to design that can stand the test of time.

“If you’re designing with that lens in mind, you’re going to have something that is going to endure, and that’s not going to become stale and irrelevant in a year or two,” Capuano said. “Because you don’t have the luxury of reinventing that physical environment every 12 or 18 or 24 months. It’s economically unviable.”

We have to be much more bespoke and how we think about evaluating the design costs and implications of every project that we work on… We have to design functionally efficient buildings for our associates so they can do what they do so well. We have to design interesting and exciting buildings for our guests. And we have to develop design solutions that are economically compelling for our owners.

Tony Capuano

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Capuano was interviewed by Mary Scoviak, custom and design content director for Hotel Investment Today, to kick off initial general session of the inaugural ALIS DESIGN+ conference at the JW Marriott/Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles L.A. Live.

He spoke about using design as a revenue driver and areas he would emphasize in capex if he were a hotel owner today.

Capuano said an “a-ha” moment about using design as a revenue driver came when Marriott launched its Edition brand with Ian Schrager in 2007.

“We did the first three Edition hotels on our balance sheet. We did adaptive reuse of old buildings in London, Miami and New York,” Capuano said. “Through the creativity of Ian’s design vision, to take these shuttered buildings and create about a billion dollars of asset value and have extraordinary operating performance, was a powerful reminder to me of the impact design can have on performance and creation of asset value.”

He said a huge lesson post-pandemic is not to use a “one size fits all” approach to the scope and scale of hotel renovations and improvements.

“We have to be very pragmatic about where we find ourselves in the cycle. All the markets have not recovered at the same pace. All the quality tiers have not recovered at the same pace. All ownership groups are not at the same stage of their financial recovery,” Capuano said. “We have to be much more bespoke and how we think about evaluating the design costs and implications of every project that we work on… We have to design functionally efficient buildings for our associates so they can do what they do so well. We have to design interesting and exciting buildings for our guests. And we have to develop design solutions that are economically compelling for our owners.”

Three areas to emphasize

Capuano was asked what areas he would want to put more of his hotel’s capex in if he were an owner of an upscale hotel right now. His first area of emphasis was in tech.

“I would make sure I was cutting edge from a technology perspective,” he said. “If you look at the speed and the consistency with which the group segment has come back, I would ensure that I had a technology infrastructure to be highly competitive in the group sector.

“When I look at the way leisure led the recovery, I would make sure that the quality and ease of use of my personal technology, particularly in the guest room, was as good or better than any of my competitors,” he said.

Capuano said even though business transient has been the “tortoise” in the “tortoise and hare” of the recovery, he would “make sure that somebody that is on the road for business has everything they need from a technology perspective, to be efficient on the road.”

Capuano said sustainability would also be a focus. “If you go back a decade ago, the number of transient/leisure/group guests who would inquire and demand from us real data on sustainability initiatives that we had in place and our progress against those goals, it was a very modest number. It has inverted completely. A modest number don’t ask for that data or use it to inform their booking decisions.”

The third area Capuano said he would focus on using is local and timeless materials. “Design trends shift like the wind,” he said. “I would studiously avoid trying to put in something that is the flavor of the day that’s not going to endure for a year or two.”