This is the kind of furniture that Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians would have used when they went to the colonies – South Africa, India, Ceylon, and Malaysia – in the military, on diplomatic service or for business. When I bought it last year I had a container load of antique British colonial and campaign furniture sent out to the island from London. It’s a simple 1970’s wood structure on stilts opposite the sea with a view of the Everglades and lakes. KRB: My colonial modern beach house on Sanibel Island in South Florida. THC: Where’s your favourite spot around the world?
Everyone talks about community now, but he was there 30 years ago in the South Side of Chicago working in the local community while I was sitting a few blocks away doing my prestigious MBA course in corporate finance. He is virtually the only man I know of my age who took a different path – one toward community service and later public service. In my generation growing up in America, we were all brought up and trained for one objective – Ivy League, MBA or Law Degree and then a job with a big investment bank or consulting firm. KRB: It may be deeply unfashionable to say this, especially in America, but I think President Obama is a rather heroic figure. The hotel space is increasingly dividing into the 95% majority that is controlled by a handful of huge monopolistic corporations – then the 5% of the hotel world that is born from truly creative and independent entrepreneurs. Working in partnership with the Mayor of London and our local council, we are building a hotel that promotes inexpensive, authentic accommodation in a creative environment for visiting artists and performers. My next hotel project is The Road – also a social enterprise – that will incorporate a hotel training programme for formerly homeless individuals into a next-generation super-budget Anti-Travelodge hotel. I am currently Chairman of Green Rooms, which is the UK’s first independent social enterprise hotel. KRB: I am obsessed with social enterprise – and the new generation of entrepreneurs who are believers in creating a better world of business that incorporates new and different values from their elders.
Instead, I started working with a small British hotelier and we started the One Aldwych project – London’s first new contemporary hotel. I tried to get Schrager to come from New York to set up a hotel with me. In the early 1990’s I thought this new re-invention of the hotel was a great idea, and unseen at the time in London. KRB: As a student in America, I witnessed the rise of Ian Schrager and his reinvention of the hotel (and also of course the reinvention of himself from former Studio 54 disco-guy and convicted felon into trendy hotel mogul). What would it mean to have a ‘beautiful’ business or enterprise? It’s interesting that as more hotels – big and small – focus on ‘design’, I see only more quantity of ‘design’, but little evidence of real style or beauty. I am also now looking at the concept of a ‘beautiful business’, something that no one is really talking about yet. There is an indefinable feeling and value to being in a room or building or space that holds that line of beauty. KRB: Beauty, especially as Hogarth called it ‘the line of beauty’ that we can create in a space or place that people can experience and enjoy. He is currently the Chairman of Green Rooms, the UK’s first social enterprise hotel for the Arts. Bredenbeck is the founder, creator and former owner of The Hoxton Hotel. Either you are and have something authentic in yourself and your product – or you are simply trying to fake it.” Kurt “I don’t think you can inject culture into a ‘brand’.
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