Travel lets me encounter the ways other people make a place welcoming. Creating Garden Villa Collection at Qiandao Lake gave me the chance to work on that question from the other side: as a founder and host.
I participated in the project’s planning, design, construction and operation, including landscape, furnishings and the arrangement of spaces. That experience changed the questions I bring with me when I visit another hotel.
I pay attention to how spaces are used, how people move through them and what connects the setting to an experience. Materials and views matter, but so does the feeling of being able to inhabit a place comfortably.
The traveller notices an experience. The host has to make it possible.
In the saved photographs of the place, I can see tea, flower arranging, movement and shared meals. Looking back at those records lets me connect the spaces I worked on with the ways people actually used them.
My background in international hotel management and tourism planning gave me one way of looking at places. Participating in the creation of a hospitality project added another: the practical work behind the experience a traveller sees.
For editorial and advisory collaborations, I bring both perspectives: the curiosity of a traveller and the experience of having created a hospitality project myself.
Discuss an editorial collaboration ↗
