Steve Wilson, cofounder, 21c Museum Hotels

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Steve Wilson, cofounder of 21c Museum Hotels. Hi, Steve, thanks so much for being here.

Steve Wilson: Hi, it’s fun. Looking forward to your probing questions.

SSR: We’ve always been such big fans of your work, and we’ve covered you a couple times in the magazine so to have you in person telling everyone your story is quite exciting for us. Tell us about your childhood growing up in Kentucky. You grew up on a farm, right?

SW: I did. In fact, I was thinking today about my mother. I grew up with a really hardworking farm family. My grandparents were farmers, my mother and father’s parents were farmers. It was a hard life. My father didn’t really take vacations. He had it all worked out so that you worked, and there was something to do year-round. It wasn’t the childhood that you would expect a hotelier to have.

SSR: Were there moments of hospitality or design that ever came into being? I know in one of the magazine articles that we wrote on you, that you used to create tents in your room?

SW: I was a creative kid, daydreaming, and thinking of ways to get out of this hard farm work. On occasion, I would daydream that I was a ringmaster in a tent, and I sometimes would even make the tent with the sheet on my bed and be underneath and pretend that everything was going to be beautiful and I was entertaining everyone with wonderful white horses and beautiful costumes on athletic people and everything was going to be bright and cheerful and happy in my tent. I was in charge of my life in my tent unlike my reality where I was in charge of nothing.

It’s interesting, I’ve thought later in life that the 21c [hotels], in a way, have become my circus tent where I create places where people can come and enjoy themselves—places where I can hang the art of young artists and give them a start on their careers and create a place where people come together and really enjoy life. It’s very often a respite—a place away from what’s that on the sidewalk.

SSR: Did you always have a love for art or is that something that came later in life?

SW: I was thinking today as far as hospitality training, I had none formally but my mother was a true southern lady who didn’t have a lot but she really put her heart and soul into entertaining her friends. She was a musician, so I think I got my creative juices from her and I did learn a lot about being nice to people and extending hospitality and making people feel comfortable. I’ve just thought of that recently. It’s interesting. She was not a great chef, the way that foodies would think of today, but she was a really good cook and she put her all in it. She made great strawberry pies. My father was mayor of this little town and she was a really good wife to him and had a great big Christmas party every year where she made everything. There were not caterers in Wickliffe, Kentucky. She made all the cookies and breads, and she really extended herself and I see that I learned a lot from her.

SSR: But hospitality wasn’t your first career per se. You did a lot of other things before you started this venture.

SW: I got started right out of college in politics, and actually I think most of my life has been some form of public relations. I started out in 4H when I was a kid, so 4H projects you have to present the little booklet and stand up and speak how you made your lamp or how you made your pot holder or took care of the calf or the pig. In a lot of ways, it was my way of getting out into the public and public relations; it’s like presenting your project, presenting yourself.

Later, I got involved in politics and out of college was a fundraiser and event planner for the governor in Kentucky. Eventually, three governors and then went into private PR and had been an art student. My current wife, Laura Lee, and I met each other through our love for art and travel so the two of us have been partners for 23 years and 21c came from our mutual love for art and travel.

SSR: You have this love, and you had a collection right, in your house that people would come see? Tell us about the farmhouse that was her family’s that you bought and restored.

SW: We have a love for arts as well as land preservation. As I’ve explained, I was raised on a farm and never thought I’d be back on a farm. I couldn’t wait to get away. I’ve learned, I think, that when you come from the land, there’s something about that that never leaves you. Even though I’m interested in art and hospitality, my wife and I live on a farm and we’re quite happy to be there. The farm that she grew up on was sold and developed. She’s always regretted that and so after we became a couple, there was another farm that was for sale and was going to be developed so we bought it together. It’s funny, we bought the farm, went to marriage counseling, and then got married.

Living on the farm is a big part of our life together and developing in the downtown is a part of that. We don’t want to develop farmland. We want people to stay in town, enjoy living in town, enjoy the restaurants and the hospitality that the city offers. Our love for the land and fear of it being gobbled up by subdivisions was a big part of our desire to help make the city centers more livable and enjoyable.

SSR: You have this love of art, you had a collection of art. How did the idea of doing a hotel come about?

SW: Laura Lee was an art collector when I met her, as was her mother so she’d had a lifetime of collecting. I had an interest in art, so we began collecting together and our collection became more contemporary at that time. We live with art. When you come into 21c and think there’s a lot of art, it’s nothing like what it is at home. The whole lifestyle of 21c began in our home, and we had museum friends and the museum director had other museum director friends and people wanted to come to our house to see the art. We had people coming by the buses to see the art. That’s when we thought, well, there’s got to be a better way to share the collection than people coming to our house in a bus. That was sort of the nucleus of the idea. Along the way, we were also trying to get the local museum to show more contemporary art and, as I said, we were trying to help the downtown. These sort of three things came together to the idea of, well, why don’t we create our own museum hotel? It’s very difficult to explain, but it’s really how it happened.

No one thought it would work. Certainly, not the bankers, the people we needed to loan us the money. The city helped us. We ended up using five individual empty buildings on the corner of 7th and Main. If you can imagine, a corner in downtown with five buildings empty, that was the perfect example of what we hoped would work. Of course, the long story is that it did work and since we did 21c, there are new hotels and restaurants and other businesses all around us. We never expected to be doing more than one. It was a project of love and passion for our hometown but because of its success, other people began asking us about their hometowns and so that’s when we decided we would do more than one, and it’s been a lot of fun.

SSR: Yeah, and how many do you have now?

SW: Eight. We’re working on Chicago, which will be opening in hopefully January or February of next year. We just announced that we’re doing St. Louis in an old YMCA building. It’s one of the fun things about doing these projects are the history of the buildings. As I mentioned, Louisville was in an old warehouse or a group of them. Two of them are in bank buildings and they have great personality on their own. We like to pull from the architecture to really create the feeling of the building. Of course, they all have contemporary art and they all have a sense of 21st-century living but there is a reference to their history in each case. One in Bentonville, Arkansas, we have a brand-new building, but it’s just a block from this courthouse, so it’s still in the middle of town. Two bank buildings, two old hotels, one Model-T Ford factory, warehouses, and now a YMCA. It’s fun.

SSR: And a lot to draw from, which you said. You partnered with Deborah Burke, the architect in New York, on all of the buildings. How did you find her and what was it about her aesthetic or her process that you loved at first and now has become part of the DNA in such a successful collaboration with you and Laura?

SW: As our idea gelled and we began to focus on how we wanted to do the first one. The first one we were going to call it Sleepers at first. We had a video of a couple sleeping, which we projected on the floor in Louisville in the beginning and we will do it again, but the piece was called Sleepers and we thought that is a fun idea to have a hotel named after art but eventually, thank goodness, we changed it.

21c of course for 21st-century art—making a point about living artist. We knew what we wanted, and we had a good friend who was the dean of the University of Kentucky architecture school and he didn’t want to recommend one to us, but he gave us a list of possibles that he thought would work. I went and visited each of them—Los Angeles, Chicago, New York—and went to some of their projects. Deborah just had the sensibility that we wanted. We wanted art to be the subject of the design.

She had done an art gallery in New York and she had a renovation of an art school at a university. We could tell that she understood what we wanted and unlike some other really great architects, she didn’t need to put her stamp on a building so that the world would know Deborah Burke did this building.

I like to say once you get along with an architect, why take a chance because there’s so many horror stories about conflicts between clients and architects and having to start over and goodness knows, we don’t want to do that. We had a great experience together the first time just in every way and enjoyed working together. She included us in the process. She gave us choices. She took no easily. There wasn’t like an ego problem. Even though we’ve done a brand-new building and restorations, she can do them equally with finesse and understanding for what the goal is. I’m not sure we can always use Deborah in the future because we’re going into a faster growth period in the company, but I’ll always have a love for Deborah. I mean we’re not going to stop using Deborah. We’ll use her all we can, but I do see the future holding multiple architects.

SSR: For people that haven’t been to a 21c, can you kind of give us a breakdown? They’re not all the same, but how much is art, how much is hotel, and how do they intertwine, and how do you guys look at that and look at a project from the beginning?

SW: Well, when we started doing more, we tried to analyze Louisville. What made Louisville successful. We really did it all from the seat of our pants. I like to say it’s easy to break the rules when you never knew what the rules were. We knew we wanted to curate the art and change it so that meant that the walls had to be flexible, the lighting had to be done in a museum-style. We wanted as much exhibition space as possible so that meant that we weren’t going to lock meeting rooms. Meeting rooms and the ballroom in Louisville, we call it the atrium. All these spaces are designed for art to be hung as much as possible.

Each building presents new challenges and the Cincinnati property had a ballroom, and it just turned out that it wasn’t feasible to hang art. It had these sort of upholstered panels around the room that were somewhat historic. Each project is different but when you walking in the front door, you know you’re in a 21c or if you’ve never been to one, you know you’re in a unique space. It looks like a museum lobby. I mean the lobby looks like a museum.

Following the first example, we tried to commission three to five pieces that would become known for that particular property, even though the exhibitions are curated and change. There will be these anchor moments that will always be there, and so they’re included in the construction budget. Louisville has a statue of David on the sidewalk and Cincinnati has a chandelier that breathes as you walk under it on the sidewalk. Each of them don’t have enough room on the sidewalk, but the bathrooms are an opportunity to be clever and sometimes the elevator lobbies are unique. Each of them has a commissioned work of art that was made just for that place.

SSR: I love how you’re playful because in the bathrooms in Cincinnati, the tiles have little, don’t they like wink at you or something happens in the tiles.

SW: There are two features in the Louisville bathroom, and I have to say, we did such a good job on that that each time I try to think of something as clever, the others are really not quite as successful as Louisville. People do love them. I have a funny story about Durham, but in Louisville, there are two features. The urinal in the men’s room is a two-way mirror so that when people are walking down the hall, they see a mirror, but if you’re in the men’s room and using the urinal, you can see through it. You can see them, so can they see you? The whole idea was based on this sort of voyeuristic tendency that people have. It’s like the idea of if there’s a keyhole, would you really peek through it? If you did, would you get caught?

In addition to that feature, in the mirrors there are little video screens where there is someone looking back at you. It was done by an artist from Fort Worth [in Texas], and as it turns out, the eyes that are looking at you are blind people. Even though they’re looking, they can’t see you. It’s sort of a play on the idea that people are looking in the mirror, probably combing their hair or fixing their lipstick, concerned how they look to other people, and the other people who are looking at them can’t see them.

It’s an interesting kind of a moment to think about vanity. In Durham, we used another kind of glass that’s see-through, but it has a pocket that becomes opaque with gas so I can’t explain the technology of it. But the front walls, you can see though them, individual bathrooms. There’s a sink and a toilet in each one and you can see right through the door but when you go in and you turn the lock, it fogs over and no one can see you. There’s this moment of: Should I go in there? What’s going to happen? Eventually, each person who walks in does lock the door and figures it out.

When we open a new hotel, we had training teams that come from other hotels to help the new employees figure out how we do things. On this occasion, we were opening Durham, a young woman who worked in Louisville and was used to the two-way glass mirror in Louisville went to the bathroom thinking it was like the Louisville glass and didn’t lock the door so she had no idea that everybody could see her anyway. Luckily, there wasn’t anyone who saw anything but for the moment, she was completely taken aback. Oh goodness.

SSR: Kind of amazing. You talk about some signature pieces and I have to ask you about the penguins—the colorful penguins that have become somewhat of your mascot, and they are even used now in Louisville tourism or citywide advertising. How did that happen? How did you find them?

SW: That is truly an accident, but we bought the penguins at the Venice Biennale some years before we opened the first 21c. A group of artists called Cracking Art who make endangered species from petroleum plastic. They’re a group of Italian men, and they had become somewhat famous in Italy. They had done a group of golden turtles that were featured at a previous Biennale, and they had positioned them all along the San Marco Square as if they were coming up out of the water. The year we were there, the penguins were perched on balconies around the city so there might be three here and two there and they were red—strange little figures in Venice, Italy. I was intrigued by them, and I can’t really explain why but they had this friendly sort of non-expression on their face. I think we bought 60 of the penguins with no purpose except they were just part of our collection and we liked them. We buy art the way I think you should, there should be a connection. Some emotional reaction to the purchase.

When we opened the first 21c in Louisville, we had a configuration of them sitting on the floor in the atrium. Since they are plastic and almost indestructible, which is the point of the artists that you make plastic, it’s going to be here forever, we allowed people to touch them and families started playing with them, children reorganized the configuration and so they became sort of a mascot by accident really. The public chose them.

After that experience, someone has a birthday and they want a penguin at their table in the restaurant or a VIP or somebody who asked for it, we’ll put a penguin in their room. I’ve actually played a trick on a few friends and put the penguin in the bed under the sheet before they come back to the room at night. They became symbolic of our attitude toward life, our love of art, and once we started thinking about others, we thought, well, what are we going to do about the penguins? The first thought was we’d had a different animal for each of our 21cs, but that didn’t seem to be the right answer, so I went to Italy with an interpreter to negotiate the contracts so we could have the rights to the penguin in North America. That turned out to be another experience. It took a long time, a lot of back and forth, but we accomplished that goal and so we have a different color for each property. We have chosen 21 colors. It just became a task to pick out a color each time, so we decided to pick a group of colors so we’ll have part of the job done.

SSR: Do people try to take said penguins?

SW:  They do as a matter of fact. There are some great stories. Somebody stole a penguin who we still don’t know who the culprit was, but they sent a series of letters from the penguin back and it actually could’ve been a great advertising campaign. There’s a Polaroid of the penguin on a beach and so he’s writing back home, he’s really sorry he left the flock, but he wanted to see the world and he’s really missing everybody. This is all in the handwritten letter with this photograph. Then there was another one from somewhere else.

Then another instance, one of the bartenders in Louisville looked up and saw through the window, a woman walking down the sidewalk with a penguin under her arm. He ran out and said, ‘What are you doing,’ and she said, ‘He wants to take a ride on the city bus.’ She’d obviously had too much to drink and he said, ‘Well, I think he wants to stay right here at home.’ He took it back.

We’ve had occasions where fraternities have made it a rush goal to steal a penguin. It’s fun. We use penguins to help introduce the hotel into a new city. They’re a friendly little reminder to people that art can come in all forms and can be fun.

SSR: Yeah, so tell us about the David [in Louisville]?

SW: We talked about the fact that we have unique pieces of art that don’t change in each facility. I asked the mayor for permission to put up a statue on the sidewalk, and he said sure. He had no idea that I was going to put up a big golden David that’s 33 feet tall. The artist Serkan Özkaya, a Turkish man created this sculpture he calls the Double David because it’s twice as big as the David in Italy, and he’s playing on the idea of what is art and what’s original as Andy Warhol did. Serkan points out that even the David that we know is a copy—that who knows how many Davids there are?

We have the Double David painted bright gold, standing on the sidewalk in Louisville, and we put it up with some fanfare and we had to stop traffic and a semi-trailer truck brought it in and stood it up. All the news stations were there. There was of course a lot of objections from the Christian community. Who can imagine that anybody could object to classic art? There was a letter to the editor from a woman who was incensed because she could never bring her granddaughter back downtown again with that naked man standing on the sidewalk. On the same day, we had a woman who made a reservation on Open Table and in the comments, she requested to be seated where she could see David’s package.

SSR: That’s amazing.

SW: That’s pretty typical, where someone hates it, someone loves it. I like to say that people who get offended at 21c love to come back to be offended again.

SSR: How do you guys go about choosing the art and collecting it and choosing it for the right hotel? Obviously, you and Laura have a wonderful knack for it but is there a process or do you just go out and find pieces that you like and find a home for them or is it kind of a mixture of both?

SW: It’s a mixture. We are members of collecting committees at different museums and travel with them. We go to the Armory in New York, we go to Art Basel in Miami. Often Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland. There are art fairs all over the world and we can’t make them all but on occasion, we’ll go. We just went to Mexico in February. I’ve been to one in Istanbul. We’ve been to one in Cuba. Since we started 21c and are continuing the process, we have an annual budget and so it’s sort of our job, which we love to procure new art because the hotels are growing.

We don’t have really many rules about collecting art. As a couple, we don’t edit each other’s, in other words, we don’t have to both love something to buy it. I think if you had to compromise on every purchase, there’d be nothing that was provocative anymore. People think that I’m the provocative one of the couple, but Laura Lee has actually purchased some things that are quite out there.

We don’t buy with the idea of investment, that we hope it’s going to become worth more so we can sell it. We have only sold one piece. It was actually a Lichtenstein and it was not contemporary. We love using the budget buying young artists, whose work is usually not as expensive as the ones that are better known. The money goes to more artists and sometimes they do become famous and sometimes they don’t.

We bought Kehinde Wiley long before he did President Obama’s portrait. There are other artists that are more well-known in the art world and there’s a photographer that we loved, that we bought 20 years ago. Some of the work has become more valuable, some of it hasn’t but it all gets exhibited some time. I tell people who are not necessarily collectors, if you like something, buy it. Don’t think ‘Does the color work in my living room, or will it go over the couch?’ Just buy it and put it under the bed if you have to for a while. If there’s a connection where one person’s creativity has reached out and grabbed you, then a statement has been made and I think that’s important. It helps us grow. It helps us understand the world. I know that everybody can’t be collectors so come to 21c and enjoy our collection.

SSR: How many personal pieces do you think you and Laura Lee have?

SW: The entire collection is personal, so when we buy something it may go in our house first or it may not. It could be in one of the hotels first. I think there’s probably around 5,000 pieces now and maintaining it, storing it, shipping it is a big part of the business. Probably unlike any other hotel company, we have a division that’s dedicated to taking care of the art. From the moment we buy it, it has to be insured, shipped, stored. Very often it comes to us in a handmade container from the artist and so it needs a more substantial container. We have a staff that actually builds crates that can stand being shipped to Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Durham, Lexington, Nashville. That’s a whole different part of the business that’s necessary.

SSR: You’ve mentioned all these wonderful cities that you’ve gone into and really helped revitalize and bring something great to the downtown area. How do you pick a location? Is it the right building, the right spot, the right need for something like a 21c or again, is that a mixture?

SW: It’s a mixture, but it’s changing a bit now are part of the Accor family. With the first 21c, we bought the buildings, we were the owners. We became the managers. We actually had to fire the managers we hired. We became a hotel management company out of necessity. We hadn’t planned to do that. Now we are leaning more toward the management of hotels, and we are looking for other people to be the owners of the buildings, which is fairly traditional in the hotel world. Sometimes we’re partners, and sometimes we’re not. In St. Louis, we’re not.

In terms of picking the right building, there are things that we look for at least more than any other hotel, it needs a larger lobby—an exhibition space. That’s a really critical part. Most of our hotels have larger rooms than average that comes from the historic building because windows are where they are and the doors are where they are, the ceilings are higher. We try to have larger, more spacious home-like bedrooms, but we must have enough exhibition space for it to really be about art. We’ve had many possible opportunities that just didn’t work, and people sometimes come to us thinking they’ve got the perfect place and it’s hard to tell them it’s a great spot for a hotel, but not for a 21c.

SSR: You mentioned that you were just recently acquired by Accor. Why was it time for you to sell a portion of the company?

SW: It became clear that we could expand faster if we had the capital behind us. Accor seemed to really appreciate who we are, that we are unique and different. It was a marriage that met both our needs and desires. They are a predominant hotel company in most of the world except North America, where they have fewer brands than they do in Europe, Asia, Africa. They wanted to expand into North America. We wanted to be able to build more 21cs, and I want 21c to be in Europe and other places besides just America. This is an opportunity for both of us.

In the beginning, it was a hard decision to make. Do they really appreciate us? Do they understand that we’re really about art? They do. We’re very happy partners, and I’m enjoying looking for new properties faster, more often than I could in the past. Chicago and St. Louis have come along because of their interests, and we’re looking at other cities of which we really can’t talk about yet but we’re definitely going to be growing faster than we have in the past 10 years.

SSR: It probably allows you to be more creative again and more development-centric again instead of the day-to-day as well.

SW: It allows me to do more circus tents. 21c became a company, I was founder and chairman and a lot of my job was dealing with things that isn’t what drives me like human resources—not just problems but running the restaurants, the operations, and preparing for the board meetings and being chairman of the board was not the same as going out and finding a great building and making it a special place. I really love finding those places, and I love the design. Transforming them into places that work, and we have an arrangement where I’m still doing that and I love it.

We have great partners who have taken on the roles of the chairman of the board, president of the company, vice president of design, vice president of operations. Most of them have been with us since the beginning and they’re doing a great job and they support the original intent, and Accor has given us all an opportunity to grow and be better at what we do.

SSR: Looking back, what have you learned or what have been some of the greatest lessons along the way that you would like to impart on others, or you wish you had known, or became your own management company because that was the right fit? Is there anything you would like to share?

SW: It’s important to take risks if you have a passion for something. I think that would work in any business, not just hotels. I’ve learned that I think it’s important to be the best at what you do no matter what you’re doing. Obviously, the hotel industry is crowded, and we didn’t know what we were doing but we had a passion and we felt like we knew how to do what we wanted to do. We had a lot of naysayers, but I’m thinking of a woman who started a cookie company at home. She started walking on the sidewalks with a basket and making her own cookies. Now she has quite a business.

I think that almost any business, if you have a real passion and love for it, and you really are dedicated to being the best at what you do, that you can be better than the competition. That’s what we’ve done, and I love the fact that because of our passion, that we have so many employees that art has actually created an opportunity for people to have livelihood. Not only for the artists that we support, but for the employees.

I love that we have such an open atmosphere where we try to treat all the employees as if they’re artists. The chefs are artists and the housekeeping staff and the front desk people are often people in transit. We know that they’re not going to be with us forever, but we embrace individuality, we try to give people opportunity. I love the fact that art is at the base of that where so many people. I’m thinking about my father at the moment, he really worried about me being this creative child and what’s going to happen to him and art, you can’t do anything with art. How are you going to support a family? ‘Art it worthless,’ he actually said to me once. The idea that we’ve actually created a business that’s successful and that you appreciate and that people come and enjoy and the heart of it is the creative spirit of artists. I love that.

SSR: You definitely did an amazing thing for the industry where you’ve turned something on top of its head and not every day do you see innovative concepts come through or come across our desk so congrats, and we can’t wait to see what you do next with Accor.

SW: Thank you.

SSR: Thank you for being here.