Jan 21, 2026 · 57 min · 11 segments
How much money would you give up to make your job a lot more interesting and fun? A few thousand dollars? Tens of thousands? For Atit Jariwala, the answer might be millions. Atit is the founder and…
Jeffrey BermanHost
Lionel FosterHost
And so digging a level deeper, you mentioned, and I never thought about it this way, the difference between a boutique hotel and an independent.
Also, anybody like the Walker Hotel in New York City, both of them, Tribeca or The Village, awesome.
Is what makes each one of your hotels a boutique hotel in that it has its own identity, but there's a uniform experience that you're gonna get? Or is it something, is there like a Bridgeton special sauce that you created
And frankly, I'd probably make a lot more money just building a bunch of Hiltons around because the really thoughtful process around all of this is creating a soul.
Most of the time with my creative director, Whitney Clark, we kind of sit back down and say, hey, we want to do an interesting project in this location.
And what is this property going to stand for? You know, who are our guests going to be? What do we want it to be? How are we going to have fun doing it? And one of the things I say is, in a boutique hotel is I actually design hotels that some people are going to hate.
Because if I think if there's no point of view, if you're catering to every customer, you basically have this dilutive experience, you know, where you kind of throw out terms like local and like green and, you know, like, you know, like, I don't know, like there's all these basic terms that people use.
And by definition, if you build a chain, you're kind of going to lose part of the uniqueness in any individual property.
And so a lot of times we use different designers in different locations and we use different people and a thought process around each property because I've tried early in my career, I tried to use a designer for every space And they made everything look uniform.
But that person kind of helps us and we work with other designers individually at each project based on...
And so digging a level deeper, you mentioned, and I never thought about it this way, the difference between a boutique hotel and an independent.
Also, anybody like the Walker Hotel in New York City, both of them, Tribeca or The Village, awesome.
Is what makes each one of your hotels a boutique hotel in that it has its own identity, but there's a uniform experience that you're gonna get? Or is it something, is there like a Bridgeton special sauce that you created
And frankly, I'd probably make a lot more money just building a bunch of Hiltons around because the really thoughtful process around all of this is creating a soul.
Most of the time with my creative director, Whitney Clark, we kind of sit back down and say, hey, we want to do an interesting project in this location.
And what is this property going to stand for? You know, who are our guests going to be? What do we want it to be? How are we going to have fun doing it? And one of the things I say is, in a boutique hotel is I actually design hotels that some people are going to hate.
Because if I think if there's no point of view, if you're catering to every customer, you basically have this dilutive experience, you know, where you kind of throw out terms like local and like green and, you know, like, you know, like, I don't know, like there's all these basic terms that people use.
And by definition, if you build a chain, you're kind of going to lose part of the uniqueness in any individual property.
And so a lot of times we use different designers in different locations and we use different people and a thought process around each property because I've tried early in my career, I tried to use a designer for every space And they made everything look uniform.
But that person kind of helps us and we work with other designers individually at each project based on...
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