Nachson Mimran on Leveraging Privilege for Good and in Service of Others

Follow us on Instagram (@slowdown.media) and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive behind-the-scenes updates and carefully curated musings. 

TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Nachson. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

NACHSON MIMRAN: Thank you. It’s such an honor.

SB: I wanted to start by asking you about this very day, hour, and minute, and specifically the current decade we’re in. You’ve previously called it “the decade that matters.” Today is September 4th, 2024, and it’s 1:19 in the afternoon, Central European Time. Meaning, we have five years and one hundred nineteen days remaining in this decade—or, put differently, roughly 46,667 hours. So what I wanted to ask you is, what do you yourself hope to do with the time remaining in this decade, and what sorts of changes do you hope humanity at large realizes in this time?

NM: Oof. You dropped…. That’s a big one. Wow. I thought we were going to slowly weave our way— First of all, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take off my shoes because I feel like I’m in someone’s home and I always take off my shoes when I’m in someone’s home. Now I feel a little bit better. I asked you not to prepare me for this talk, so now I’m thrown into the deep end, which is something I’m pretty used to. I think when we [at to.org] started our mission, in 2015, it seemed like 2030 was so far away, which is really the timeline that the [United Nations’] Sustainable Development Goals gave us, although they change it very often. But it’s very good to have some form of goal and time to look forward to.

I think that when you talk about time— I tell my children all the time, “You have time.” When we say, “I don’t have time to do this, I don’t have time to do that.” We don’t “prioritize time,” so we always can carve out time. And that’s what we’ve been doing since we promised ourselves that we were going to focus our lives on solving these big issues. I am extremely optimistic that, even though we haven’t hit some of the benchmarks that were laid out by the Sustainable Development Goals, what I’ve realized since starting is the amount of people who are willing to have deep conversations and who are questioning themselves and their purpose in this world has increased dramatically. When I started having these conversations at dinner tables in 2016, ’17, people were like, “Wow, this guy’s weird. You’re making me uncomfortable.” And today, I feel like that’s all we talk about at dinner conversations.

What I’d really love to see, and I’m not going to go into stats, but what I would really love to see is for all small talk to disappear. And I think that we have the capacity to go in deep right away and we shouldn’t waste the time to small talk, because everybody deep down inside wants to get real. And that’s, I think, the biggest thing that I’ve seen since starting this.

SB: And this being to.org. We’ll get into Alpina Gstaad as well. Speaking of time, you spent much of this past summer in a period of what you’ve described as meditation and deep introspection. Why was it so important for you to unplug and turn inward? Why now? And what’d you learn in the process?

NM: I think— I’m approaching 40. I’m only 36, but the last period of my career has been getting comfortable with what I know and really comfortable with what I don’t know. And there’ve been some big changes personally in my life—very positive changes—in the last year where I gained a lot of confidence. But with confidence, it needs to be balanced with humility, and it’s hard to contain the ego.

I think we’ve gotta put in a lot of work to do that. There were a few moments this year where I looked in the mirror and I’m like, “You’re the shit.” And then I look back again and I’m like, “No, you’re not. You’re just one of almost eight billion. That’s all you are. And you’re in service of everybody else, and you must remember that.” It takes a lot of work. It takes meditation, it takes a lot of nature and grounding—literally grounding—to just remember that we’re just one, but we’re one in service of all.

SB: And vulnerability, of course, playing a role here, right?

NM: Yeah. I find that the beauty of life is imperfection, and so I strive to always find my own imperfections and to feel confident and comfortable basking in the vulnerabilities. I also feel that I always want to be the one that throws myself under the bus that I’m driving. I don’t want to give anybody the privilege of doing that, so I’m always the first one to say, “I don’t know this. I failed at this,” because that gives me great comfort with myself.

SB: I’d like to turn here to your work at Alpina Gstaad. And quickly, just a little background for the audience. This hotel, which opened in 2012, has fifty-six rooms, and—at least this is what I found in my research—cost three hundred thirty-six million dollars to build, with an average cost of five million dollars per room. It is an extraordinary place. So tell me about your role at Alpina Gstaad as the chairman and creative director and your vision for it, past, present, and future.

NM: Well, like a lot of things that I’ve done in my life, I was just thrown into it. I have a father, [Jean Claude Mimran], who’s a remarkable human being, who never looked at my grades. I failed throughout high school; I was enrolled in a university, but I don’t think I went much. And at 21 years old, he said, “Hey, by the way, you’re going to finish building this and you’re going to operate this.” I said, “I don’t know anything about luxury. We’re farmers from West Africa.”

SB: [Laughs]

NM: “Yes, you had a little stint in luxury in the eighties, but I don’t know anything about this.” He said, “Well, you’ll figure it out. And if you don’t, it’s okay. As long as you’re healthy, it doesn’t matter.”

And so together with our co-founder, [Marcel Bach], who is actually a Swiss farmer—so my two shareholders were a Swiss farmer and an African farmer, and we went about just first principles like, keep it simple. How would you welcome someone into your home? How do you want someone to feel in your home? Forget about the stars, forget about the critics, just focus on every single person or animal that walks through this place and how do you blow their minds—humbly blow their minds. And it was challenging. I’m sure everybody here in hospitality knows that it’s extremely hard to be consistent and you’re dealing with so many different personalities—in our case, a hundred and eighty-two personalities. And it’s just this magical thing where, if you have the soul and if you treat everybody with kindness and respect, it’ll work out.

It was interesting because some of our advisors at the beginning who came from the industry, the traditional industry, said that it should be done in a certain way and there were certain codes, and we literally did the opposite—literally. Because I said, “This doesn’t feel right. You can show me all the data you want, but that just doesn’t feel right.”

SB: What’s an example?

NM: Well, I think the example is, “You need to be strict with your staff, you need to run this place with an iron fist because people respond to authority and it needs to be run like a tight ship.” And this was the moment where I was like, “Actually, I think people follow through love and that respect comes from love and not from fear.” And I just looked around at the people that were on this journey with us and I said, “I think these people are going to be more dedicated if they come into their job every day with a smile and love what they do as opposed to fearing the loss of their job or the reprimand from a GM.” That was probably the first one that was just like, “Let’s do it differently.” By the way, in a place like Gstaad, which is not Berlin, where that would be more common in a five-star hotel in a place like Gstaad, normally people respect the industry codes.

SB: We have so much we could talk about, so I want to switch here to to.org. Tell me a bit about your work there, which you and your younger brother, Arieh, co-founded, in 2015. I think it’s worth mentioning here that “to” is a reference to the Hebrew phrase, “tikkun olam,” which means, “to repair the world.”

NM: I think we share something in common, which is the passing of someone very important in our life. And in our case, it was the sudden death of our mother. My brother was 18, I was 25, and there was just this one thing that she always taught us which was, “Do acts of tikkun.” And acts of tikkun are acts of kindness. If you see a kid crying in the playground, go hug that kid. If you see trash on the floor, pick up the trash. And you measure your day in many ways by your acts of tikkun. You have to enjoy them, of course, so that’s where the play and the fun comes into it. But that was something that she instilled in us.

And so when she passed away, we said, Okay, how do we take these micro-tikkuns that we’ve been doing all our lives, which are very important, and how do we scale that? How do we make a lot of money to do a lot of good, not to buy a lot of things? And have a lot of fun? And could we create a lifestyle that was encompassing those three things? And we just set about trying to figure it out. And it’s been a really, really fun and rewarding journey, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I thank my mother almost every night for leaving us, because I think I’d be a very different person if it wasn’t for that. Tell us a little bit about your experience.

SB: Well, that’s just going to open up another door, but I think something does occur when a maternal presence leaves the room. And what do you fill with that void, with that space, and how do you embrace, I guess, that sense of matrescence? What do you do with it? What do you make? I think we’re both sitting on this stage, actually, because we lost our moms, which is sort of profound. But I don’t know how to actually make total sense of it. And I think, sometimes when I’m interviewing, I rarely have the mic turned back on me, so I’m almost flustered right now because it’s such a deep, profound, confounding thing to go through. And at different points in our lives—you were, like you said, in your twenties; I was 4, so what do you do with that time that you’re given?

The other thing that I’ve thought a lot about, just more deeply on this subject is—and I don’t think this applies to just the death of a mother, I think it’s the death of anyone who you’re really close to—teaches you the fragility of life and what a gift it is to wake up in the morning and simply take a breath. And I love thinking about time in breaths because it is like, “What are you going to make with that time? What are you going to make with your breaths? What are you going to make with your seconds and your minutes?” I think when you shift time that way, it becomes much more profound. And just to bring it back to to.org, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how you took those tikkuns and structured the organization. Because I think how you’ve structured it is also really interesting and testament to your ambition for the thing.

NM: I grew up in the late eighties and nineties, where it didn’t feel, at least in popular culture, that being kind and caring was cool. It was like rap, it was aggression, it was loud cars, it was bling. It was quite superficial and quite masculine immaturity. And when we started investing in start-ups that were really laser-focused on solving issues, real issues, not like, “How do we make Angry Birds 10?” but “How do we solve this societal issue or this environmental issue?” I realized that it was actually super cool—it was really cool and it was sexy. And then I realized that we needed to make doing good aspirational and sexy and cool and move a little bit away from some of the more aggressive activism, which, by the way, I support and we love, and there’s a role for that in the world, and I deeply admire those rock star activists, but we started looking at it like, activism should be more creative. Creative in the mindset, where going from A to B, it’s not a straight line.

And if we really want the whole world to get behind saving humanity and saving our planet, then we need to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and we need to be a little less dogmatic and a bit more pragmatic, actually—with soul, pragmatism with soul. And so that’s where we really started diving deeper into, “Okay, how do we make this sexy? What makes something sexy? What is the definition of sexy?” And popular culture, really penetrating popular culture with positive messaging, but always with quality design and quality story and just quality—that’s how we’re going to get people to actually start buying in to this. So we invested in a lot of consumer brands like a brand called Pangaia, which is a sustainable-fashion brand that I think was maybe one of the first to really make sustainability cool. I mean, I love Patagonia. I’m a big fan of Patagonia, but it’s maybe the 2.0.

We looked at lab diamonds, so synthetic diamonds, and quite a lot of, I’d say culturally relevant industries and products. And then we got a lot more geeky, and that’s where decarbonization came in. So that’s on the investment front. And then on the philanthropic work, we realized that you can’t solve everything with a business model. And so for-profit capital has an important role to play, obviously within a capitalistic framework. But nonprofit capital is really important because it’s unconditional, or at least it should be unconditional—it should be unrestricted. 

Nonprofit should be de-risking, it should be the first mover to de-risk something and to take big bets without the expectation of big rewards—or at least financial rewards. And so we got involved in a lot of things. It’s hard to pick something that you care about when there’s so many things that are exciting to dive into: the oceans, the trees, the topsoil. But what we realized was that displacement was going to be and is already probably one of the biggest issues of our time. And so that’s what we decided to focus on with the foundation.

SB: And we’ll get to a few of your various to.org projects in a bit. Just to start, I was hoping you’d maybe share a bit about your 2024 initiative called Regenerate. It’s this project around mental and physical well-being in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee settlement, which is home to more than one-hundred-sixty thousand people. 

You’re collaborating on it with the architect Sumayya Vally and her firm, Counterspace, who are designing the space that will combine fitness, agriculture, education, different cultural elements. So there’ll be a gym and a fitness center, yoga and meditation rooms, a computer lab, spaces for workshops, public markets…. Tell me about this vision, the project, the timeline, and ultimately what you hope to realize with it.

NM: I’m obsessed with space. I think space is amazing. I think right now we’re in a space and it’s amazing. And I think when I’m designing space, co-designing space, the question that always comes up is, “What is truly the purpose of this space beyond aesthetics and the architecture? But what do we want that space to generate?” And when I look at my childhood—and I think it’s probably very similar to most people in this room—we’ve had access to spaces where we could play, where we can think, where we can regenerate, and where we can create. 

And I’ve spent a lot of time in refugee camps in the last ten years, and there just isn’t any space for that. It’s very, “This is your tarp and this is your tent and you’re going to sleep there, and then you line up for food and services there.” And it’s like, but we’re all the same. We all desire to have places where we can actually manifest these desires.

And so that’s what we’ve started, by looking at it and saying, “If we need to prototype future cities for the billions of displaced people in the next decades.…” Those are the figures, they’re scary—billions. We’re at about a hundred and thirty-five million today and we already don’t know what to do. Refugee camps are inhumane and we can’t open up our borders. Already, at this level, we’re struggling. 

We don’t know how to integrate properly. And so this brings up this whole topic of hospitality, actually. We’re going to need to look at hospitality beyond my boutique hotel, your boutique hotel, our chains, and look at hospitality from a real global perspective and what does that mean? So the first one we did was Play. We collaborated with Hassell studio.

And that’s a funny little story because I met Xavier [De Kestelier], who’s head of innovation and technology at Hassell studio, and we met and we were jamming on, “How do you 3-D print future structures in space on Mars?” And I love to geek out on these kinds of things, but then I always bring it back and say, “Okay, wait, hold on. Before space, what about this planet?” And so I tell him about some of our visions for refugee camps, and immediately he said, “I’m in. I’m going to speak to my board about this. I’d love to do this pro bono with you.” So we built a music and arts academy in Bidi Bidi, which is a refugee camp in Uganda, and—

SB: Africa’s largest refugee camp.

NM: Yeah. Africa’s largest refugee camp. And I think we built the most beautiful building ever built in the history of refugee camps. And that was an important thing. As an artist, as a designer, if I do something beautiful in Gstaad, it has to be beautiful somewhere else. There’s no trade-off. It didn’t cost three hundred and thirty-six or so million francs, but there is no trade-off. Everyone deserves to have beautiful and purposeful things in their vicinity.

SB: Yeah. And I’ve read that the locals have already taken to calling the building “the mushroom.” So it’s very much this place-making thing. But I loved that also, not just because its distinctive form is mushroom-like, but there’s so much creativity sprouting out of this place. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what has occurred there in the, I guess around nine or ten months that it’s been there? What’s been reported back and what have you seen during visits?

NM: Maybe I’ll step back like seven or eight years before going into that specific space, because when a friend of mine called me up, an amazing guy called Mike Zuckerman, and he said, “You’ve gotta come down to this refugee camp in Uganda.” This one was called Nakivale. He said, “What you’re going to see is going to blow your mind.” And I didn’t know what to expect. The term “refugee” is heavily branded and has a lot of the fear embedded in it that media want us to feel. 

So I had very preconceived visions of what I was going to experience, and it was completely the opposite. I hung out with unbelievably talented and entrepreneurial men and women and children, and I hung out there for a week and slept with them. And I was like, “Damn. They’re so talented.”

It dawned on me that it’s so true that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t. So it’s like, “Okay. Well, if that’s the case, how do you create those opportunities?” But you’ve got to be at the service of their definition of opportunity, not your own. Very often in the humanitarian industrial complex, they go into things saying, “This is how it should be. This is our view of how it should be.” And there’s often deeply embedded special interests. Again, if you follow the money, it usually stinks. And we said, “Let’s do things differently. Let’s really go grassroots. We’re just there at your service. What do you want to see?” 

And so one guy said, “I’d love a recording studio.” So we said, “Okay, great. Let’s set up a little recording studio.” That recording studio, a few years later, recorded the number one single in Uganda. That little recording studio, which cost us less than five thousand dollars, was literally the place where talent was able to actually shine and be heard.

And so that’s what gave us the confidence to say, “Okay, let’s now step this up. Let’s go from a little recording studio to an institution, and make it world-renowned.” The interesting thing is very often at the beginning, even though I knew that what I said before, which is, you need to listen very deeply to their concerns and their desires and their dreams, we still made mistakes. We still made mistakes. And the one thing I realized is that, space, it metamorphosizes into different utilities. So we call this an art and music academy, but guess what? It’s an inspirational space that has shade and has rainwater collection, so there’s potable water in the space.

SB: I read two hundred thousand–liter capabilities, so this is one point two million liters of water every year.

NM: Yeah.

SB: From a performing arts—

NM: Right. Sometimes you have women entrepreneurial groups that use this space to motivate, to share learnings, to set up sewing machines, to work on an organic femcare start-up. It’s just amazing what happens, the resourcefulness of talented people, when you just give them space, just space.

SB: And I feel like if we’re talking about your projects, we have to talk about The Throne. 

NM: [Laughs]

SB: Share what The Throne is for everyone here.

NM: I think everybody in this room has unfortunately experienced what it’s like to go into a port-a-potty, you know one of those Totos or… Toi Toi. Some of these brands. It’s the worst few minutes of my day. Obviously it smells really bad, but it’s ugly. It’s ugly and it’s made out of this virgin plastic, and it’s really not inspirational. And I don’t know about you, but some of my greatest moments have been in the bathroom. The bathroom should be a place of inspiration. And so I had my personal experience on a construction site in Switzerland that I was running, and I went into one of these port-a-potties and I said, “Enough. It can’t be. We need another one.”

And so we called up some members of our creative collective and I said, “Can we 3D-print a port-a-potty with composting capabilities so that we could grow some carrots next door and make this out of as much upcycled material as possible?” And so Nagami, partners of ours, with their incredible seven-axis robotic ABB 3-D printer, got to work. And a few months later, we delivered this on the construction site and it was made out of three hundred and thirty kilos of upcycled, single-use medical waste. And it’s so beautiful, and I love to sit on it. [Laughs]

SB: You installed this thing in the middle of the garden at Alpina Gstaad, did you not? [Laughs]

NM: Yeah. Actually when our construction site was getting to completion, this toilet needed a new home. And I said, “It’s so beautiful. And the messaging of it is so important, because this act that we do a few times a day, we take for granted.” Something like seven hundred thousand people in the world die because they don’t have access to clean and safe sanitation and places to go to the bathroom. I was going down this rabbit hole and I realized that actually there’s also something extremely unfair towards young women who sometimes miss a week, a month of school because they don’t feel comfortable caring to their feminine needs at school.

Imagine the disaster on humanity if women are missing out on their scholastic career because of such a simple thing that we take for granted. So in the usual way that I love to provoke at a five-star hotel, if I went around a hotel with a T-shirt that said, like, “#Toilets” or “#Sanitation,” no one would talk to me, right? But if I put this beautiful-looking piece of design in the garden, I know that people are going to ask me questions about what this is. Then that unlocks the opportunity to talk to these very privileged individuals about what I just mentioned. So it’s like a Trojan Horse to allow us to have these deeper conversations.

SB: This is a segue to a question I wanted to ask, which is, what has it been like for you to process these vastly different experiences, your time in these refugee settlements that are the focus of so much of your work at to.org and then quite literally decamping to Gstaad and spending time in this five-star resort in the Swiss Alps? Have you been able to build bridges between these worlds? Do you view The Throne as an example of that, of using design as a tool or using your learnings in one place and bringing them to the other, vice versa?

NM: It was very challenging at the beginning, I must say, to have one foot in these two completely opposite worlds—or seemingly opposite. And actually that’s the interesting thing. Because if you take away the décor, we’re all very similar. Human beings have very similar characteristics once you take the fluff or the non-fluff away. And so spending time trying to solve this big issue with amazing people in refugee camps, and then the next day sitting in a lobby with some of the most privileged people in the world, some of them complaining about something so insignificant, and sometimes in my head I’m like, “Oh, my God, really? Am I really listening to this right now? Do you even know what the rest of the world is going through? And you’re talking to me about how you’re size S in slippers and your slipper was size M, and I should have known that.” And it’s confusing. But I needed to stay very, very disciplined in what the objective is. And the objective, for me, was bridging these worlds. And I think that that is the exciting thing, is to find these commonalities between individuals from different worlds. 

Actually, one of our first “hacks” was we brought this 1977 Chevrolet ice cream van that was an art piece by Richard Hamilton, one of the fathers of American Street art. And it was just a thing to look at. And when we acquired it, from a foundation, I went into the ice cream truck, and of course, there was no ice cream and there was nothing. I said, “This is such a waste of space. There’s space inside of this very beautiful-looking thing, and you want to go in and there’s nothing.” So together with a friend, Lapo Elkann, I sent it to his tuning garage where he’s used to tuning Ferraris, and I said, “Can you tune this art piece?” And he said, “But it’s an art piece, it’s going to lose its value.”

I’m like, “Fuck it. We’re going to create new value out of it. It doesn’t matter if we mess with the artist’s piece, it’s going to live on in different ways.” So we created this really comfortable little meeting room in this ice cream van, and then we gave the exact dimensions of this ice cream van and pictures to our communities in different refugee camps, so Bangladesh and Kutupalong, Nakivale, etc. 

And we said, “Build your version of this van.” And in Kutupalong, it was made out of bamboo; in Uganda, they made one out of bottles, plastic bottles filled with plastic bags. “And let’s connect them with Skype, at the time, and what I’ll do is I’ll invite certain people that are staying in our hotel to come and have a conversation with some of you in these different communities.”

So if I had a friend who is an architect, for example, staying at the hotel, I’d write a little note and say, “Meet me in the ice cream van at four o’clock for tea.” And they would get into the ice cream van and they would meet a fellow architect in a refugee camp in Uganda. And what’s amazing is, when they’re in those spaces, they’re equal. You don’t see the five-star hotel behind and you don’t see a refugee camp behind the other one. It’s architect-to-architect, talent-to-talent. And it was amazing. We did that for years with all types of different talents. And the experiences were just amazing, because it really brought people together despite those differences. So that was step one.

And step two now is like, “Let’s get some of our friends that are accomplished, or at least recognized musicians to come down and co-create and jam together with musicians in Bidi Bidi. Let’s bring spiritual wellness, sports athletes down to Kakuma in a new space that will be, hopefully, ready in about a year to share practices of how to regenerate mentally, physically, spiritually.” 

I think at the very least, with our restricted funds, if you gave me a hundred billion dollars, I think we could really, really change things. I think we have the right network of people who know what to do. But that’s not the case, so we need to think really strategically about how we inspire people. And inspiration, you can’t put metrics to it. It just goes out there and then there’s the ripple effect. And I see myself as someone that is just constantly trying to provoke those ripple effects.

SB: I want to bring this conversation back to this event’s youth theme and ask you about your upbringing. You and your siblings grew up between Switzerland and Senegal, so this dual continental existence has been your reality since birth. And your father, who was born in Morocco, built a vast fortune overseeing your family’s business, primarily agribusiness, which is one of the biggest in West Africa. 

And I think it should be said here, you were raised with great privilege, which, I just want to note, refreshingly and rather unusually, you’re open to talking about. And I was hoping maybe you could paint a picture of your youth for us here and what it was like to grow up in the Mimran household. What did it teach you about wealth and privilege?

NM: Mmm. I’m just going back in time. The smells, the feeling, the conversations—it was always a safe place to experiment. There always had to be purpose in whatever we did. So of course, money can unlock things, but money didn’t give you the right. It was this really interesting thing where it’s a tool—it’s not your passport—and it’s a tool that should be used for more than just yourself or your inner circle. 

And growing up in West Africa with a father who deeply cared about the development of these emerging countries, who was there at the time of independence and really helped these countries get up on their feet industrially, I always saw the country and the people first, not the company. So before “impact investing” was a term, we lived in that.

And it took me years to find out that actually we give free healthcare to over a hundred and fifty thousand people. He had never told me that. It was like, “Doing good should be silent. You just do it. It’s normal. You don’t need to get congratulated; you don’t need stars or awards. That’s just how you do it.” So I learned a lot of humility through those stories. I had a mother who was just this unbelievable character. Maybe my hospitality comes from her. Always making everyone feel included—friends, family, strangers. 

I remember one day walking in the street of Dakar, I was probably 6 or 7 years old, and there were these two gentlemen playing backgammon on the floor in the street. One had no arm, the other one was missing most of his teeth, and they were laughing. And I remember pulling on my mom’s arm and I was saying, “Why are they laughing? Why are they happy?” Because at that age I thought, “You can’t be happy if you physically look disenfranchised like that.”

She sat me down and we played backgammon with them for, I don’t know, it must’ve been at least half an hour. And when we stood up again, she’s like, “That’s why they’re happy.” I remember that, I was like, “Wow. I’m so lucky to have experienced something like that.” Where everything shifted all of a sudden, where I went back to Switzerland and I’d see that there’s less smiles and less laughter than in the streets of Dakar. 

So I was like, “Okay. Well, I guess privilege does not unlock happiness, and the lack of privilege does not mean you can’t be happy.” And so I got all of this amazing download as a child, and that’s probably the greatest privilege of all that I was able to have, is to understand that from a young age.

SB: And we talked about your mom’s influence on to.org, but in hearing this story, I’m struck that her legacy is also a key part of your hospitality work at Alpina Gstaad. Do you see it that way, that, in a sense, Alpina Gstaad is also pushing forward her legacy?

NM: Yeah. I’m laughing because I have images of my mom who was this very simple woman from Ohio who was an athlete. She would show up at these very glitzy events with ripped jeans and a white tank top when all her peers were covered in [fancy] stuff. And I guess this is the first time I really think about this, but when we started the hotel, one of the other things was like, “So what’s the dress code? What’s the policy on animals and pets?” I said, “There’s no policy. Just don’t be an asshole, and it’s fine.” 

You dress however you want to dress, whatever you’re comfortable dressing in. And if other people are bothered by how you dress, then maybe that’s not the place that they should be. Maybe there’s another place they should go and sleep if they’re offended by the fact that you’re wearing shorts. 

And so I guess some of those things now thinking about it, definitely defined it. And it’s like, “Pets, of course, as long as the pet is well-behaved. Just like you, if you’re well-behaved, you’re welcome in my home. And if you’re not well-behaved, well next time you try to book, it will be full.” 

[Laughter]

SB: All right. Well, switching gears into finish. We have just a few minutes left. Prior to today’s conversation, you and I briefly spoke about the meaning of luxury and how, in an over-franchised world and our time of late-stage capitalism, it’s more important than ever to embrace, or at least consider, what you call “the art of not scaling.” Could you share a bit about this philosophy? What does it mean to not scale? I think it should be said, you aren’t planning to franchise Alpina Gstaad anytime soon.

NM: No. Luxury, I think, is individuality. If you walk into a room and everyone’s wearing the same Patek Philippe watch or the same Loro Piana shoes, is that luxury? I don’t know. Not to me. If you don’t know who made something, if the story of that person is not embedded in the product, if you can’t trace the materials and the supply chain back to human beings that have put time into something, then maybe it’s not luxury. So that’s just a little side note. I think there’s the luxury industrial complex, and it’s a complex now, and it’s eating away at what I think is true luxury. 

But I don’t have to partake in it, so it’s okay. But I think that, I love when you go to a town and you know that you’re going to find that mom-and-pop place that has been passed on generation to generation, you know you’re going to find that candle, you know you’re going to eat that specific pasta or whatever. And for me, that’s romantic. That’s the joy of travel; it’s the joy of discovery.

And now you go to these places and it’s the same chains, it’s like the uber franchising of everything, and it’s just so boring. It’s just boring. And so when someone’s like, “Would you build an Alpina in Aspen?” I’d say, “Well, it’s really tough because, ‘Alp-ina’?” I think it’s location-based. I don’t think we can do that in the States. And one of my mentors and dear friends is André Balazs, and I think he has really done a great job with his properties, because they all have different brands. 

But when you go there, you feel like there is that touch, that André touch, and that’s always welcoming and very, very first name–focused. And so if I were to potentially, and there are a few projects—of course you can’t stop, I’m just constantly excited and curious about what’s next—it would definitely not be under the same brand.

And I think that the future, for me at least, is places where you leave feeling extremely inspired, healthier. I’m very into regenerative functional integrative medicine and the slow movement of food. And I think that the future of socializing is being healthy together. And so of course, if someone wants a martini, we’ll make them an amazing martini. But if we can help change the narrative around what it means to socialize, which has been somewhat, I think, polluted by nocive ingredients, I think that would be great. And that would be a really cool challenge and I’m up for it.

SB: Nachson, we’re at time. We have 46,666 hours left in this decade. Thank you all for joining us and it’s a pleasure to sit down with you.

NM: Thank you. It was an honor.

This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at The Lobby “hospitality event” in Copenhagen on September 4, 2024. Special thanks to Dorte Bagge and The Lobby team.

The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo.