[CLIP] "No bank would lend us money" — the brothel that became a cult hotel | Ari S. Heckman (Ash)

**Ari S. Heckman** (0:00)
New York is this place where all of these, like, fantastical characters, some of whom we've met tonight, are jammed into a couple of square miles. Density of, like, creative, smart, enterprising people is such a gift.

**Adrien Garcia** (0:15)
And what was your dream when you were a kid ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (0:17)
I always knew from a really young age that I wanted to be a real estate developer. I was obsessed with the idea of, like, creating something, and I wanted to be involved in every facet of it.

**Adrien Garcia** (0:28)
What is a real estate developer ? What is he doing, exactly ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (0:32)
It's like a film producer. They often come up with the concept and the idea, and they figure out how to execute it, and they bring all of the participants together to make the thing happen.

**Adrien Garcia** (0:42)
Why you decided to go by yourself ? Actually, what has been with the clique ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (0:45)
I think I always knew that I wanted to do my own thing. Like, I was sort of like, entrepreneurship was very much in my DNA.
Maybe it's narcissism, maybe it's ego, I don't know. This feels like chaos is in the air. Like, it's a crazy time, but a good time to kind of try to do your own thing.

**Adrien Garcia** (1:02)
What's the final destination ? What's the whole vision for this Ash Hotel ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (1:06)
We knew so little about creating and designing a hotel, and those are the things that people actually liked about it. It's what made the product interesting.

**Adrien Garcia** (1:15)
What do you make sure your brand doesn't fade away ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (1:19)
When you go into something completely naive, and you bring an inexperience, there's something really, really beautiful about that. Obviously, it could go terribly wrong. You don't know the rules to know you're breaking them.

**Adrien Garcia** (1:32)
What has been the first encounter with hospitality, with hotels ?

**Ari S. Heckman** (1:35)
The first encounter ?

**Adrien Garcia** (1:36)
Yeah.

**Ari S. Heckman** (1:37)
Well, I always loved traveling, and I loved the hotel as a place. Like, I think the hotel, a hotel, a good hotel, is such an important anchor in a community. You know, people sometimes are just like, you know, it's only people from out of town, visitors or tourists who are staying there. But a good hotel really becomes like the town square. It's where, you know, locals go in the morning to get their coffee or read the newspaper. And I've always loved the sort of like kinetic interaction that happens in a good hotel. Like, the Ace in New York, when it opened, was a perfect example of that. The lobby, it's a little bit different these days, back then the lobby was like the epicenter of activity. It's where anyone went to hang out during the day, and people did work there on their laptops, and it just felt like this like highly relevant, like third space, as people call it. And that appealed to me. I loved the sort of romance and glamour that the like Grand Dame hotels had back in the day, where it's where you would go to celebrate your special events, or an anecdote that I love is like, in any town, the hotel was usually where the like, telegraph or telegram was. So you had to go there to get important communications. It played a civic function. And I just love the, I love the romance and the history of what a good hotel is. And so much of what we do at Ash has tried to sort of recreate that mystique and that glamour of an old world hotel. And bring a more European perspective of hospitality to the US.

**Adrien Garcia** (3:22)
So from the little apartment to a hotel is quite a bridge.

**Ari S. Heckman** (3:27)
It is, it is.

**Adrien Garcia** (3:29)
Tell me the story.

**Ari S. Heckman** (3:30)
So when it was 2012, and a building came up for sale in Providence, the town we were talking about earlier.
And I knew the building very well. It was a notorious building. It was a brothel and a strip club. And it was still operating as a brothel and a strip club. Rhode Island was the, I think the last state besides Nevada to have legalized prostitution. So there was like, you know, there were girls dancing on the first floor and then hotel rooms for rent by the hour upstairs. So it was very seedy, but it was in a very cool historic building in a neighborhood that I could tell was changing. There were new restaurants and flats and just, you know, interesting cultural things happening. And I thought, and I had always had a fantasy about doing a hotel project. And I thought, if I ever do a hotel in my life, this opportunity is like begging for me to do it. I know the place really well. I know that it needs a cool, interesting, vibey hotel that doesn't exist there.