a boutique hotel instead — despite having no
hotel experience. “I was looking for something
more creative that also made people feel good,”
he says. “Plus, I love to travel.”
It was 1987, when boutique hotels were
hitting the scene in the United States. Ian
Schrager had started his ultrahip (and expen-
sive) hotels, and Bill Kimpton had created his
more corporate boutique lodging. Neither felt
right to Conley. “Chip thought boutique hotels
didn’t have to be so hip and that they could be
affordable,” says Oren Bronstein, former head
of design development for Joie de Vivre and
now owner of Oren Bronstein Designs.
To prove the point, Conley purchased a pay-
by-the-hour motel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin
district and transformed it into the Phoenix, in
his words a “rock ’n’ roll hotel that would appeal
to musicians on the road and creative types.”
With the Phoenix, Conley also created the
formula he would use with all his Joie de Vivre
hotels, from Costanoa in Pescadero to Hotel
Erwin in Venice Beach. “Every hotel was based
on a magazine,” says Conley. “We came up with
five adjectives that defined that magazine, and
created a hotel around that.”
For the Phoenix, the magazine was Rolling
Stone, and the descriptors Conley and his staff
came up with were funky, irreverent, adventur-
ous, cool and young-at-heart. “Everything we did
in the hotel, from the design of the guest rooms
to the unique services to the staff we hired, all
came back to those five adjectives,” Conley says.
An atrium at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters is
ringed by offices and meeting rooms that reflect the
range of homes in the company’s repertoire.
