Frictionless by Design - Drew Stuart - Defining Hospitality

What if the best sign of great hospitality is that nothing ever gets in your way? Dan Ryan sits down for a live recording of Defining Hospitality, set in a podcast studio tucked inside a former 1930s sandwich shop at Rockefeller Center. The conversation moves from frictionless guest experiences to the habit of saying “we” instead of “I,” with stops along the way for world building, big stakeholder rooms, and the fears that grow as a business does. It’s candid, funny, and built on a friendship that came before any business did.

Drew Stewart is an architect, interior designer, and occasional developer, and a founding partner and director of construction and development at INC Architecture & Design. He has spent 20 years growing the New York studio into a powerhouse, earning a spot in the Interior Design Hall of Fame along the way. His work includes the TWA Hotel, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, and the Atlas Hotel at Harvard, and he is celebrating the milestone with a monograph, Us Is More, hitting shelves TODAY October 14th.

Chapters:

00:00 Why Hospitality Matters

00:35 Meet Drew Stewart

01:22 Recording at Rock Center

03:00 A Designer’s Eye for Detail

04:09 Defining Frictionless Hospitality

05:44 Managing Mega Projects

11:19 Tech That Aligns Stakeholders

14:52 Hall of Fame Moment

19:07 Us Is More and The Book