INTERVIEW – CHRIS NORTON, CEO EQUINOX HOTELS: “I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THE BRAND IS SEEN AS A BRAND THAT CAN LIVE BOTH IN THE RESORT AND THE CITY WORLD”
After a career spanning more than 30 years in the upper echelons of the luxury hospitality industry, Chris Norton shares his ambitions for Equinox Hotels, the brand he is building around a high-performance living |
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INTERVIEW – CHRIS NORTON, CEO EQUINOX HOTELS: “I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THE BRAND IS SEEN AS A BRAND THAT CAN LIVE BOTH IN THE RESORT AND THE CITY WORLD”
After a career spanning more than 30 years in the upper echelons of the luxury hospitality industry, Chris Norton shares his ambitions for Equinox Hotels, the brand he is building around a high-performance living |
Category: Worldwide - Interviews and portraits
- Interviews - Industry leaders
Interview made by Vanessa Guerrier-Buisine on 2023-12-15
The day after Thanksgiving, from his spacious New York office, Chris Norton told the Journal des Palaces what makes him tick - his career, his group, Equinox Hotels, and also his own story.
Chris fell in love with the world of hospitality at the age of 15-16, when he went behind the scenes of restaurants owned by a friend's father in Switzerland. It was a discovery that he combined with the lifestyle of hospitality cultivated by his parents at home. The magic of the preparations, the adrenalin felt before the guests arrive, the entrance of the guests on stage, the joy of those moments…
Fascinated by this melody, he enrolled in the EHL Hospitality Business School. His first internship in Nice, at the legendary Negresco hotel “with Madame Augier”, sparked off many anecdotes. His connection with the French Riviera and Provence would endure over the years, with frequent stays at his home in Aix-en-Provence with his French wife Brigitte. After five years at the helm of the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, the man handles the art of the French language with brio. His culture of luxury has been enriched by circles of reflection such as the Comité Colbert.
His international career has been solidly built within the Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts group. Successively Regional Vice President, then President for the EMEA region, he rose to the position of President, Global Product and Chief Operating Officer of Four Seasons, before becoming CEO of the Equinox Group, to create the Equinox Hotels brand.
After more than 30 years of shaping the soul of luxury hotels around the world, it is with a holistic vision that Christopher Norton has chosen to lead the emerging Equinox Hotels group. From the clubs, temples of high-performance living, hotels are now being created, including the first in New York.
Chris Norton talks to Le Journal des Palaces about Equinox and his innovative vision of luxury hospitality.Journal des Palaces: Why did you choose a career in luxury hospitality? Where does your passion come from?Chris Norton: There's an old expression saying that “pick a work that you love, and you will feel like you never worked a day in your life”. And I've always felt like this about my business, even though it's really hard work, it's physically demanding, and it takes a lot of hours. You work on weekends and holidays and Christmas and New Years, but I always thought it was fun.
I think hospitality is a mixture of things you do that just appeal that to my character. Its organization, its beautiful things, its surroundings, its people; we're like merchants of happiness.
I draw a parallel between the theatre and the hotel business. People don't realize that, unlike producing a luxury good, when you produce a luxury service, there's a huge part of it that is every day online live. The skill set of the delivery is very close to an amazing performance in the hotel business, I always thought that the customer was interactive with the actors.Is this how you define luxury hospitality?I always approached it as the producer of the show. I ran hotels as a general manager, regional VP that were voted number one in the world, so there was always this competitive edge of making sure that the show was spectacular.
Likewise, I've given speeches on luxury for 30 years, it’s constantly changing. There's something about luxury that is about comfort and elegance, about being able to enjoy something that is superior to others. It has to be rare to be luxury, and usually, it's expensive. There's something that is exclusive about luxury, it has to be of very high quality. And there's indulgence and a pleasurable experience that's not ordinary, but luxury is very subjective and depends on culture.How is Equinox Hotels a one-of-a-kind luxury hotel group? What is the group's DNA?Then I started with my new company here, and it was a blank sheet of paper. The idea was to do something that was not only differentiated for the sake of being different, but we wanted to do something that was also relevant to the values of the next generation. The biggest thing that everybody wants to be part of is Wellness. Wellness speaks to a new generation, that consumes luxury very different from my generation or my parents’ generation. Time is important for them, the regen, the feeling that life is worth living.
The core value of the brand is about high-performance living. People have realized that to be the best version of yourself, the key ingredients are around the pillars of the brand, which are movement, nutrition, regeneration, and community: - We define movement through exercise, it is important to be physically active and engaged, whatever the exercise;
- Nutrition: if you think about the way people eat today, it’s pandemic, it’s so bad, you just have to be thoughtful;
- Then the number one regen piece is sleep. So when we designed the guests' rooms, it was not only about the look and the feel, but we hired sleep psychologists, like scientists, to help us design all aspects of the bedroom, to create a perfect environment. First, a button in our room says, “dark, quiet, cool”. When you click it, the whole room set goes to sleep, and it blacks out totally. We also spend a lot of money on design by putting a lot of things inside the walls and the doors to make sure that it's very quiet and silent. And then the third thing is, scientifically, a perfect temperature, 17-18 °C. So, automatically, the room goes dark, shuts down, sets the temperature, and you're in the quiet;
- And then the other thing is community, the hanging out and being with people that you feel comfortable with.
We don't look at our brand as a retreat, it's not something you should do, and then you go back to your regular life and. It's something you should do every day.Your hotels and resorts are an evolution of your Clubs, could you tell us more about what the club brings to the hotels?If you come to Equinox Hotel in New York, there's a 60,000 sq ft club, not a gym, but a club, that has over 5,000 members, which means we have in New York about 1,500 people who go in and out of the door every day to the club, separate lobby from the hotel.
When you continue your fitness or well-being routine while you travel, you enter a community of local people, and it creates an energy level. Those people who come to the club stay on an average two and a half hours in the club every day, so they socialize… It's very interactive, and if you compare other luxury hotels to ours, in a normal luxury hotel, between 8 to 12% of the guests use the hotel gym. In our hotel, between 30 and 40% of our guests use the club. Unlike a lot of your typical gym, our membership is fifty-fifty male-female, and the average age is about 40, not 22 or 23. It really is a lifestyle that has nothing to do with age, it’s a mindset. When you check into the hotel, technically, you become a club member, and we have about 350,000 club members today.
We are not a sport’s hotel; we are a luxury lifestyle hotel. Moreover, there are clubs without hotels, but never a hotel without a club. The club is a footfall. We are located in Hudson Yards, which is in the middle of Chelsea in Manhattan, and the club creates activity in the hotel. We believe that when we do multi-use mixed projects, you can not only do offices or residences. The club, with the hotel and the restaurant, creates life because people want to be together.Your hotel in New York has been voted one of the top 50 hotels in the world. What’s the key to your success?When we opened in 2019, and we shut that down, to reopen in 2021, so we are really like less than three years old. And if you look at the 50 Best Hotels in the World, we're the only lifestyle luxury hotel that is in there. Everybody else is like traditional luxury, and I think it's because we've been very innovative in what we do, and we provide very high service levels.Can you give a specific example of one of your high level of service which is really the upper luxury service that you can deliver to your guests?The luxury starts with 300 pages of details about the guest when you really know your client. We spend a lot of time making sure we understand who our guest is. And we lead from the front. I remember when I ran the George V in Paris, I would be in the lobby as the regional vice president at five o’clock. I was in the lobby leading from the front, I wanted to see and meet, to hear my customers. What I learned in that hour and a half every day, it would take me a week sitting in the office to find out. I think in luxury, your client contact and the brand contact happen at a high level.
We had a very famous people came in a few nights ago at 2:00am. My entire senior team was at the hotel, to make sure it went well. Most hotels would delegate that to the night manager. I have senior people here seven days a week, not five days a week.
Furthermore, we totally reinvented room service. Our room service is more luxurious and more relevant, we have no room service tables, we bring in a Tiffin-box, designed in Italy. When the room service team come to the room, it unfolds like a flower. We reinvented the private bar; we offer twice as many things inside the bar than most luxury hotels do, they're all fun and healthy. But they’re not only food, they’re also sexual health products, clothing, etc.
The beds are total luxury. We spend probably three times as much money buying our beds than the other luxury brands. Our mattresses are totally handmade, and it's all natural materials: horse hair, seaweed, charcoal, cotton, and it's all handsome. So the way the beds act and the way they control temperature, these are touches on the hardware side.
So, the mixture of that and then it all being around high-performance living and you sleeping well, eating well and feeling great.What are the next destinations in which you would like to expand? Why and when?Our strategy of expansion is global, with resorts and city hotels.
What I can tell you is that the next definition most certainly will be a resort. And it could either be in Mexico, in Florida or the Middle East. It was important for me to do a resort next because I want to make sure that the brand is seen as a brand that can live both in the resort and the city world. I don't want to be caught like other brands that have expanded into one area. I wanted to make sure that we have a DNA that works as well in resorts as it does in cities.
We're working on some city destinations also, but that will be a little longer because they're greenfield. We have signed six LOI in the US and Mexico, so we don’t make announcements yet. We're actively negotiating on an amazing side of the Caribbean and in Asia, where we're looking at some very interesting possibilities in Japan and South Korea, and then we're actively talking to European gateway cities with the connection to resorts. We're looking very closely at a combination of, for example, Madrid and Ibiza, or between Milano, Tuscany, and Sicily.You have announced a partnership with Red Sea Global. Could you talk about it?We're sitting on half of the Marina, which is over 100 slips, and will take yachts up to 300 feet (ca. 91 m). So, the Marina will be activated, with restaurants, shops, and bars and our hotel and residences. And we're sitting on a cove, so that the other side of the hotel will be on a beautiful beach, with amazing views of the Bay and the ocean and still be stunning.Will the club be as big in your resorts than in your city-hotels?The member’s structure is different; the clubs are probably a little smaller in footprint. Here in New York, it's 60,000 square feet; most of our clubs are 30,000 to 40,000 square feet. In our resorts, they'll certainly be bigger than other hotels and the outfitting is much better, but it is more of an integrated experience.
If you come to Equinox and you get a personal trainer, or a Pilates class, you know that the quality of those classes is world-class. So, we have a lot of credibility and the authenticity of a brand that’s been doing this for 30 years.What advice would you give to a young person wanting to make a career in the luxury hotel sector?I think number one is to find somebody they can first talk to about what it’s all about, a realistic view of what the luxury hotel industry is. All the good stuff and all the hard stuff.
Then number two is to spend at least one or two stages early on in your life to get a sense of what you know is behind the surface. Because most people see is the stage; they see the beautiful lobbies and the flowers and the food, and they want to be part of that.
And then use half heart and half head in making your choice.
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