How can you design two physically separate, yet culturally connected, hotels in one 37-story building?
Hamish finds out by chatting with George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, the revered and award-winning designers who took on this exact question when designing the Moxy Downtown Los Angeles and the AC Hotel Downtown Los Angeles — both under the same roof of a brand new building in downtown Los Angeles.
George and Glenn share how the hotels inhabit the building as two siblings, very different in how they gather guests and set a mood, but both steeped in the same artistic backdrop and desert landscapes of Southern California.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
George: The two hotels, Moxy and the AC, are like, tethered to each other within the new building. And one responds to the extrovert and the other responds to the introvert.
Hamish: Oh, I love that.
Glenn: To me — it’s like two different brothers, or two different sisters.
Glenn: “Oh my God, I got two twins. They’re identical, but they’re not identical at all.”
Hamish: (Laughs)
George: They’re not identical. No. They’re fraternal.
Glenn: One will never, never sit down and eat at the proper time and throw their food across the room. And the other one also wants to have a great time, but listens to mummy and daddy.
HAMISH: This is Travel by Design — where we chat with the visionaries behind the world’s most remarkable hotels. I’m your host, Hamish Kilburn, Editor of Hotel Designs.
And on today’s episode I’m speaking with two of the most renowned designers in the world of hospitality and travel.
George: I’m George Yabu. I’m one half of Yabu Pushelberg,
Glenn: And I’m the other half, Glenn Pushelberg…
With forty years experience and countless awards under their belts, George and Glenn designed the Moxy Downtown Los Angeles, and the AC Hotel Downtown Los Angeles.
These are two different brands. Moxy hotels are playful and charged with a restless energy, while the AC hotels are refined and filled with an air of elegance.
In downtown L.A., these two hotels share one 37 story building. But they stand apart, with separate entrances.
And since each hotel has a unique personality, George and Glenn used their design skills to weave those two personalities together — and stand out amongst the latest, trendiest hotspots in the neighborhood.
So I started our conversation with the simplest question I could think of.
Hamish: Why are both of these hotels in the same building?
Glenn: (Laughs)
George: Economics. Return on investment. (Laughs)
Glenn: Economics, economics.
Hamish: (Laughs)
Glenn: Uh, you know —
Glenn: You know what, you know, I kind of, at the beginning I thought, this is a crazy idea. Why would you do that? They’ll compete with each other. But you know what?
Glenn: Depending on where my emotion’s at, I, I could have two different moods and go to the same building.
Glenn: You know, some days I want to get up in the morning, I wanna wear a black t-shirt and a black pair of jeans and boots.
Glenn: Other days I wanna get up and I got the most stylish pair of sweats and some great kicks. And I’m in a different mood. And I think that the two hotels kind of epitomized that; I —
Hamish: And how did you envision these two moods translating to different experiences?
George: So, if I were, uh, going back to LA for pleasure, I would probably stay at Moxy. I would, uh, go there, uh, with a spirit, or with the intention of possibilities. I have no agenda. Anything can happen.
George: If I was coming for work, if I were to have a meeting, business meeting in Los Angeles, I would stay at the AC, because I’ve got a big day tomorrow, and this is the best place to be.
George: I see it as a bit more, “This is my respite. This is my home to recharge —
George: If I want some shenanigans, if I wanna elevate my, uh, my energy level and be stimulated, I’ll go next door to the Moxy.”
George: But to me, I’m not gonna be the last to stay at the party.
George: And, and, and it sounds like that person could be boring?
George: No. they just have more different interests. Now, one of those specific interests could be a, maybe a bit more business-oriented.
George: But this concern that Glenn and I have is we, we deplore business hotels, and so we didn’t want to give it a business feel — but it had to have all the elements of that, plus an elevated experience of being, chic, modern…
Hamish: Well you know, I’d like to just give people a visual sense of that difference between these two personalities —
Hamish:So at the Moxy, you have the “Desert Nomad” — which is a, um, let’s say a chaotic mash-up of leather, snakeskin, earth tones, some of these more rugged elements…
Hamish: And then at the AC — you have the kind of, um, let’s say the “Artist in Residence.” So that’s where everything is precisely laid out, no clashing elements, very focused setting.
Hamish: And when you put these side by side, I see a big challenge here, because it’s not like you want to typecast the guest into identifying with one or the other.
George: And that’s really the most hardest thing, I think —
Glenn: And there’s two hotels.
Glenn: You know, when you’re doing two simultaneously and there can be parallels, but there shouldn’t be parallels, and I need to be able to stay in both hotels for different reasons.
Glenn: You know, I think the misnomer about things like the, the Moxy, is that they’re for like, young people. Well, they’re not for young people. They’re for anybody that wants to feel free.
Glenn: We all have different moods and emotions, and we try to capture a specific part of that, so it’s not really, “Oh, you’re 19 to, to 26, so you sleep here. And you’re 24 to 32, you sleep there,” it’s, “How do I feel that day?”
Glenn: And you can be 92 and, and be a Moxy customer.
Hamish: I can almost imagine you working on the lobby for the Moxy and then kind of thinking in your head, “Well, I wonder how AC’s gonna answer to that” —
Glenn: Right.
Hamish: — or vice versa. I could just imagine those conversations happening.
Glenn: You know, you’re always testing yourself to make sure you don’t blend your ideas together, but they’re distinct and clear.
Glenn: But the real proof is: Would I, would I stay in this hotel versus that hotel? No. I want to stay in both hotels for different reasons at different times. That’s what’s important.
Hamish: I would love to be a fly on the wall in your conversations with, with the developers and the clients when you start getting a project. Because for me, it seems as if you don’t really take too much notice in audience research, target audience research. You’re more focused on really creating the narrative.
Hamish: And actually, this leads me on to my next point really nicely, because you’ve created masterpieces all around the world and you’ve, in my opinion, earned legendary statuses in hotel design, on the hotel design scene individually and together. And yet I can’t pinpoint a signature style from you both, which I really love, and it keeps us all on our toes.
Hamish: So how do you start, um, creating that design narrative when, when you approach a project?
Glenn: Well, you know we have secret degrees.
Hamish: (Chuckles)
Glenn: We have MBWAs. “Masters of Business by Walking Around.”
Hamish: (Laughs)
Glenn: Uh, watching, looking, absorbing, seeing.
George: Extreme curiosity.
Glenn: Yeah, innate curiosity. We don’t like repeating ourselves. We don’t like doing the same…. We like to absorb the place. We like to absorb the information that a client is giving us, but also what we feel, see and hear around the world. And compare.
Glenn: You know, we travel extensively. We have, I think 40 projects in, in multitudes of places on Earth. And I think the more you see on Earth, and the more you understand culturally how things are the same and how they’re different, and then you start refracting that down to even smaller lo- lo- locales within a place or a city.
Glenn: Times Square is different than, than uptown New York, which is different than downtown. The east side is different than the west side. And that that goes for any city, whether it’s London or LA or any place else. And so over, you know, we’re ancient. So over time you, you catch these, the nuances of things and you, we thrive on evolving these, the nuances that we learn to create from. To make things that are unique and special.
Hamish: And so when you think about your own experiences with downtown Los Angeles, how did that inform your design choices? For the Moxy, in particular.
Glenn: You know, we started dreaming about it, I guess going to our youth. There was was a bunch of really incredible movies made in the ’70s, late ’70s and ’80s, about the grittiness of downtown LA. The proximity to the desert, et cetera. And that was kind of our jumping off point for the project.
Glenn: We really wanted to make a hotel that had that kind of rawness of the late ’70s and early ’80s of downtown LA. But of course, because when people come to downtown LA today, they expect the art scene, they expect the newer restaurants…
Glenn: Of course, everything’s getting polished up and gentrified. But that was our notion: To bring back something that felt real and authentic to that area of town.
George: And that’s challenging in a new building. This is a, the structure is a brand new building in downtown Los Angeles. So if you start out with a fixed theme and going into a new building, it just doesn’t feel — it has a chance of being not too genuine. We don’t have anything to grab onto in the structure.
George: So we, everything that we put into it, the desert colors, the rammed earth wall panels, the leather motorcycle, uh, ottoman that looks like it came off a Harley Davidson seat. These are like elements or moments or signals that are, are to our mind, authentic. And downtown LA is… Glenn says, says “gritty.”
Glenn: And it’s no different than Berlin or Athens or cities like that, that are kind of places that are emerging, but they still have the past to them. And you wanna not lose that and make things too polished up.
Glenn: Where, whereas if you’re as, as we’ve done, build a Moxy in Times Square it, it — ’cause Moxy Times Square is polished up, it has to be a little bit more polished up. That’s an expectation.
Glenn: You know what, in the, in the world that we live in, of hotel design, everybody in, in, in the hotel design world, they talk about “contextualism” — well, it’s overused and abused word that you wanna make something appropriate for, for, for the place, and usually it’s done in very obvious ways. For us you want to create a, a hotel that feels right for the place, but you don’t really exactly know why.
Glenn: It’s a challenge of emotionally resonating and, and doing something that’s appropriate for the, for the brand and also for the place.
Glenn: I could stay in West Hollywood, I could stay in Santa Monica, but I choose to stay in downtown LA, ’cause I want to feel that. It’s an emotion.
George: For me, it’s a really tough one.
George: We always work with a metaphor when we design projects, whether it’s retail or whether it’s a restaurant or whether it’s a, uh, resort —
George: But it, it was a really unusual project. It wasn’t like designing a, a resort in Bangkok.
George: It’s the most undesigned designed hotel that we’ve ever created or conceptualized.
Hamish: And with the Moxy, do you think that’s because it was a new build, so that essentially became an opportunity to… you know, push the envelope?
George: Exactly.
George: It’s meant to be not too connected and too tight and too obvious as a theme. As a California dreaming theme. Or, or know, the mind of the rebel, and to let loose and be free. It just seemed too disingenuous in a new building. So we had, every little part came together, but they don’t fit precisely together. That was really important. Because that’s too forced.
George: So we want the experiences here to take, pick up these visual moments, uh, piece by piece, but not look at it as, as a whole. It was important for us not for the patron to come in and say, “Okay, where’s that perfect selfie background? What am I supposed to be impressed by?”
George: You know, you have to little dig a little deeper to put all the parts together and say, “Oh, oh, oh, wow. I get it.”
Hamish: I wanna move on to the public areas. And —
Glenn: Sure.
Hamish: I mean, massively thanks to you guys, um, public areas are so vastly different from what they used to be. They’re no longer just practical spaces where we’re checking in.
Glenn: I’ll talk to you about principles of, of all of this today. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an AC, a Moxy, or something else.
Glenn: In the olden days — which is like five years ago, ’cause things move fast — hotels would tell you where to eat. They would tell you where to drink. They would tell you where to work. They would tell you where to go to the gym…
Glenn: But you know, the way we live today, we live in a much more fluid way. We wanna work where we can watch people, sometimes we wanna, we want to have a quiet drink and pick up somebody in a corner. We want to be the center of attention. We want to live in the middle of things. We want to eat, we wanna snack in the lobby, we want to drink in the restaurant.
Glenn: So everything becomes more fluid. So when you start with a public space, like a lobby, especially an extended lobby, you want to provide all the opportunities so that the guest can make their own choices.
Hamish: Well I think that’s certainly true for The Moxy. But I can see how even if someone’s staying at the AC — they would want to hop over and spend some time at the Moxy, because there’s so much going on in that lobby. You know, even just visually, the colors aren’t uniform, every piece of furniture and art just pops out in its own way…
Glenn: I call the color scheme, “ugly sexy.” It’s like mismatch-match. Nothing works, but everything works because it doesn’t work.
Hamish: Ugly sexy…
George: We don’t want to be specific. What you see out of that when you’re working there, and you, you take a pause from your thoughts at your laptop.
George: And you’re looking at this black leather art installation that’s pretty massive and pretty in your face. And you start looking at the details and you’re going, “Oh, wow.”
George: (Laughs briefly) You know, it, it’s the unfinished interpretation of things…
George: I don’t want you to come here and see all the details right away. It’s really important that you don’t pick everything up.
Hamish: You know, the whole approach you’re describing with The Moxy… I find it fascinating, because I think we’re so used to the goal of a hotel being comfortable, and so —
Hamish: I think when people walk into a hotel, they ultimately want to feel, and they expect to feel like they belong to that space.
Hamish: And here you’re introducing these subtle moments of friction, youknow, I’m thinking about the mismatched furniture.
Hamish: And I’m thinking, also, about the art installation on the wall, the one that’s made of leather horseriding crops.
George: You know, everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to belong to a tribe these days. Maybe I’m, I’m, don’t belong to that generation.
Glenn: Yes you do.
George: But who wants to belong to a tribe?
George: Everything’s segmented. You know, you go out to a bar or something, and now it’s like layers of distinct, um, of groups of people and they don’t mix as they used to.
George: Everything is so gentrified and so specific that, you know, people go to these small, uh, clubs and, and like in Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and because it’s a bunch of small, the, you know the type of patrons or the tribe you’re gonna run to.
George: In the past there were like larger social venues of drinking establishments and dance clubs and whatever. They catered to a broader mix. There was a, there was a frisson in the air that, uh, was palpable because the tribes were not dissect and separated and presented in, in, in categories and corners.
George: And that’s what we thought this hotel lobby should be. The tribes are everywhere, but they coexist.
Hamish: I love that.
Glenn: I also believe, today, that, you know, we should start as the disrupters. We should attract the disruptors. We should attract the young artists, young musicians, the people that like to ride around on motorcycles or whatever. Because they will then create a broader and bigger audience —
Glenn: But if you start in the middle and, and try to get to the edge, you’ll never touch the edge. But if you start at the edge, but you do it respectfully, you’ll hit the middle. It has more, it gives the project much more longevity.
Hamish: So we’ve been talking about the Moxy all this time, and I want to now bring things back to the AC, because it does have its own unexpected moments. And I’m thinking about first impressions, just the way you enter the hotel for the first time.
Hamish: I love how basically, you start with this tiny lobby on the ground floor. But then you get into the lift, and go all the way to the top of the building, where you step out and immediately have this panoramic view overlooking all of Downtown L.A. It’s pretty incredible.
Glenn: It’s really getting off into somebody’s big house.
George: It’s the California — it is the California that’s laid back.
Glenn: Yeah.
Hamish: That’s such a refreshing take, because when I think about the concept of an “artist in residence,” I think, you know, downtown, tall buildings — I feel like I’m gonna be walking into a sparse, cold kind of atmosphere. But what I actually feel and see at the AC is more of an artist’s home, their personal home. It’s lived in, it’s warm, sun-drenched. And just relaxing and tranquil.
George: When you think of attic spaces, you think of garrets, you think of old barns that artists make into their inspirational studios. That was just that singular move that we did. There’s a lot of, uh, wood beam and, and plank ceilings throughout this hotel. And that single move warmed it up. Transported your, your, your, your perception away from aluminum and metal glass skyscraper.
Hamish: I, I really love the idea of disrupting the norm of what a public area should be like, and the fact that you’ve kind of taken the inspiration from an artist’s residence. It just really, I’m, I’m kind of inspired to understand how that changes the traveler’s mindset as soon as they walk in. Cause it doesn’t feel like you’re walking into a hotel.
Glenn: Well, you know, you’re right. Good hotels as they’ve said for a million years, should aspire people to think differently about things.
Glenn: You know, everybody says that a hotel should transport you to some place else. So often said, so few times accomplished. And I think that that’s really the point, is to treat people’s imagination, to create emotional resonance through what you do that gives them a little bit of, “Ah, this is so special. This is like, I don’t feel I’m in some packaged or parceled place. I feel this belongs to me, but it’s something I’ve never seen or experienced or done before. Something in my imagination.”
George: And even beyond that, if you take it, if you level that up, if you can achieve that, and not be aware of the design, that all these considerations were put on paper and discussed and evolved…
George: If the patron doesn’t feel the structure, that it was considered and it was, “This is where you should turn left, and this is what you should experience when you look right”… it shouldn’t feel self-conscious to them.
George: The best thing is that nobody is aware of all the work that went into it, to create this emotional experience.
Hamish: That’s fabulous.
Glenn: Perfectly imperfect is, is the best.
Hamish: You manage to inject yourselves into each project with zero ego. Zero ego. You always allow the project to speak for itself. That’s really fascinating.
Glenn: Yeah.
George: Oh, totally.
George: Yeah. I’m not really a Leo.
Glenn: Oh, you totally are. (Laugh)
George: I really am not. Glenn says I really am, but I’m really, really, not.
Hamish: (Laughs)
Glenn: (Chortles) You have no idea.
George: It’s really, it’s, I’m interchangeable. You know? I can be, I can be malleable. And, uh, I think I was lucky in this.
George: I always wanted to be an architect, full-blown licensed architect. But I realized, “Phew! That was a close call,” because there’s so many constraints, you know, under that realm of architecture; there’s too much weight put on the responsibility — “I’m the master builder. I’m gonna make society much better with the world I create for you,” well, it was actually —
Hamish: Well, I would argue that you’ve both challenged the perception of what interior design is, as well.
Glenn: We’ve given it a shot.
George: Well, we always want to work from possibilities.
Hamish: I do! I do!
George: We wanna work from possibilities and not from constraints. Because constraints, you identify all the things on budget, local, you know, code, the client wishes, what I think, but… you box yourself in too much.
George: In the world of design, anything is possible. So you start with what the goal should be. What do you want? And you’re, you’re David and Goliath. Once a design is done for like a year, a year and a half. The rest of the time, until it’s built — five, six years, eight years, sometimes it takes 10 years to build a new hotel…
George: You are, you’re David and you’re protecting this fantastic concept from all these outside, external sources.
George: Too many people just, you know, worry about what you can’t do. And this is this project here is the epitome of what you can do. Anything. You can do anything.
Hamish: That’s brilliant.
George: You just have to make sure that you’re, you’re convincing. And how do you be convincing in this case? Don’t try too hard.
Hamish: Well I I’ll tell you what I would love to do. I would love to have more time to speak to you both, but unfortunately we do have to wrap it up ’cause we’re out of time.
Hamish: But it has been such an honor talking to you. I feel as if we’ve only just scratched the surface of your mindset when sort of approaching these projects.
Hamish: But, but thank you so much. It’s been really fascinating learning about both hotels and their personalities, and how you work as well.
George: Well, thank you, Hamish. It was a pleasure.
Glenn: Let’d do it again.
Hamish: Travel by Design is a podcast by Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, the online travel magazine where you’ll find more inspiring hotel design stories.
If you’re curious about the craft of hotel design, then check out marriottbonvoy.com/travelbydesign.
This episode was produced by Narratively Creative. Our Lead Producers are Theresa Avila and James Boo. Our Associate Producer is Monica Hunter-Hart.
Interview recording by Allie Graham.
Story edits by Priscilla Alabi, sound design by Dennis Funk and James Boo — and audio engineering by Dorian Love.
Our Marriott Bonvoy Traveler producers are Jess Moss and Robin Bennefield.
Special thanks to George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg for speaking with me about their work.
I’m your host, Hamish Kilburn. Don’t forget to subscribe to Travel by Design wherever you get your podcasts. And tune in next time to hear more design stories behind the world’s most fascinating hotels.
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