The concepts I use regularly to co-build with my clients are a cohesive set of layers. These layers are distinct, but they are never separate. The work, then, is not linear so much as cumulative. It asks you to build in relationship, to refine through contact, and to let each layer deepen the next.

And while visual branding/marketing is often cast as the “fun, creative one,” I’d argue that the opportunity for creative expression in our businesses is wholly dependent on a healthy financial foundation. Because a beautiful business that cannot sustain itself is, eventually, a very expensive creative project.

There is, of course, risk involved in nearly every entrepreneurial endeavor, I think we do ourselves a disservice when we confuse risk with uncertainty. Risk can be examined, modeled, and sometimes mitigated. We can make assumptions, test scenarios, understand our exposure, and decide which possibilities are worth pursuing.

Every entrepreneur has their own relationship to risk. But faith and financial intelligence are not mutually exclusive. I would also argue that a healthy financial foundation creates greater freedom to take creative risks, because it gives us a clearer understanding of what we can afford to experiment with, where we have room to move, and what consequences we’re prepared to absorb.

Small Biz Hygiene: Five things I check every week

I make financial and operational discipline a regular practice — it can also be a creative process (keep reading!) — which is the relatively unglamorous work of staying close to the actual reality of my business.

I check my bank accounts constantly, and the number of my clients who report they are too scared to look is staggering. My mother, who I credit for almost all of my financial literacy, jokes that if you were woken up in the middle of the night with a gun to your head, you should be able to quote your numbers. While this visual may increase your anxiety about numbers, the wisdom is that without clarity, there is no basis for… well, anything. Data is fuel for generative movement (whether you have $5 or $5M, you’ve got to know).

But knowing your bank balance is not the same as understanding your financial position. Revenue is not profit, and profit is not cash. You need to be able to distinguish between cash available today, profit earned, accounts receivable, upcoming liabilities, and cash committed. This is where the practical, operational intelligence becomes functional.

Now for the creative part! Being able to ask and answer these kinds of questions directly changes the way I think about my business creatively…marketing becomes less of an abstract obligation to be visible and more of a deliberate exercise in creating opportunity.

And because I believe that the founder is part of the business’s operating system, I think the check-in has to extend beyond the financials.

These questions might seem to be a different conversation, but I’ve seen (and lived) how quickly a founder’s exhaustion, enthusiasm, or loss of conviction can influence the quality of their decisions and the outcomes in their business. A business can be financially healthy and personally unsustainable. It can also be deeply fulfilling and economically precarious.

Understanding the levers

Two companies might generate the same annual revenue and have entirely different economics, with their own unique set of variables. I think of these variables as the levers of a business and the strategy lives in understanding how they interact and when to pull them.

Financial modeling helps us explore these questions before committing significant time, money, or energy to an answer. And increasingly, so does technology.

I’ve been having stimulating conversations lately about AI and the ways it’s changing the experience of running a small business. For founders who have historically worn every hat, the ability to use AI as a thought partner, research assistant, analytical tool, or operational support system is significant. But a large delta remains between having access to intelligence and knowing how to direct it.

I’ve been experimenting with my own AI workflows and I’m excited to help founders integrate these tools into their businesses. The opportunity is to become more deliberate about where our own attention and intelligence are most valuable.

An invitation to look beneath the surface: a 3-hour intensive for your business

As we approach the end of the year (how?!) I’m opening a handful of private intensives through my Brand Lab. Build your business with greater confidence, imagination, and financial discipline: a three-hour strategic working session to understand where your business stands, what’s working, what’s costing you, and where to focus next.

What we’ll explore:

01/ ESSENCE - what are you building, and does your current business still reflect that ambition? Where are you spending your time, energy, and attention?

02/ STRUCTURE - revenue streams, costs, pricing, profitability, cash flow, business systems, and the assumptions underpinning your next stage of growth.

03/ EXPRESSION - marketing, brand communication, partnerships, sales channels, customer experience, and ways to make your existing work more visible and valuable

04/ THE NEXT 90 DAYS - identify the highest-leverage opportunities, the risks worth addressing, and the next steps that deserve your attention.

Designed for founders who want a more complete understanding of their business before heading into 2027. You can simply reply directly to this email and tell me a little about your business and what you’re hoping to figure out.

INVESTMENT - $1,250

INQUIRE

Depending on where you are in your business, our work together might involve:

• Financial modeling and projections to help you make informed decisions about hiring, investing, launching, expanding, or changing direction, with a clearer understanding of the risks and potential returns.

• Brand strategy and positioning that goes beyond visual identity to inform your pricing, customer experience, differentiation, and the demand you’re creating.

• Identifying and developing revenue streams, whether that means reconsidering your existing offers, finding new ways to monetize your capabilities, or building more predictable recurring income.

• Cost analysis and profitability, including understanding where your money is going, why your profitability might not match the cash in your bank account, and whether your current model is delivering the margins you need.

• Understanding the levers of your business, from pricing and sales channels to cost structures and operational capacity, and recognizing which adjustments are most likely to produce meaningful results.

• AI tools and agentic workflows, with hands-on guidance to help you set up systems that take repetitive tasks off your plate, organize information, and free your attention for the creative thinking, relationships, and decisions that require human judgment.

Cover image: Sergio Roger's Post-Corinthian Column (2024), part of the group show How it's Going at 193 Gallery

This work can include cultivating self-awareness, organizing values, prioritizing priorities, restructuring time management, and playing with the generative process of redaction (intentionally creating space for the core essence of someone’s true creativity to shine).

The external expression of a brand is so often a reflection of the internal organization of the person building it. When someone is unclear about what they value, where they want to direct their attention, or which of their many interests they actually want to pursue, that lack of clarity tends to find its way into the business. It shows up clearly in the offerings, the messaging, the visual identity, and perhaps most consequentially, in the experience of building the thing itself.

Before we can make meaningful decisions about what something should look like, sound like, or offer the world, we need to understand what is at its center. The work is to uncover the organizing principles that already exist beneath the accumulation of ideas, expectations, possibilities, and external influences.

This morning I attended a creative clarity workshop in Hudson, NY, and one of the core tenets of the conversation was discernment. A light went on for me in framing this concept.

Founders, builders, artists, and creatives are often remarkably high-capacity people. Our skills, ideas, passions, and interests frequently outrun our ability to focus on a singular output. There are simply too many things we could do, and because we are capable of doing so many of them, the question of what we should do becomes much more complicated.

The jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none syndrome becomes a entire state of being(🙋🏻‍♀️), although, I don’t necessarily think the problem is a lack of mastery. I think the problem is that capacity can become its own form of captivity when every possibility presents itself as something we are responsible for bringing into existence.

I know this experience intimately. I can see the potential in almost anything, and the excitement of imagining what something could become is often enough to make me want to participate in its creation. But there is a very real distinction between recognizing possibility and accepting responsibility for realizing it.

Enter: a season of creative discernment.

There is an Al-Anon concept, a series of questions, designed to introduce some space between the impulse to speak and the decision to do so.

1. Does it need to be said?

2. Does it need to be said right now?

3. Does it need to be said BY ME?

We are going to borrow this as a framework for the creative process, particularly for those of us who are constantly generating ideas and identifying opportunities.

1. Does this idea need to come to life? (Probably yes, you’re a genius with endlessly brilliant ideas)

2. Does it need to be created right now? (Maybe. Might be early, might be late)

3. Does it need to be created BY ME? (Hint: Probably not)

Just because I can see something, understand its potential, or possess the skills to bring it into existence does not necessarily mean it belongs to me to create. Some ideas are meant to be shared, some are meant to be entrusted to other people, some need time to mature, and others may have served their entire purpose simply by passing through our imagination.

Eros, entropy, and the organization of life force

There’s a needle here I am going to attempt to thread… the relationship between creative discernment and Eros (the vital life force associated with connection, growth, desire, and creation), and the organization of our creative output to strengthen EROS.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud developed his concept of Eros as the life instinct, a force oriented toward preserving life, forming connections, and bringing things together. I would argue my desire (along with every other artist/founder I know) to create and build is a deeply instinctual, life affirming practice. I deeply associate creativity with eros.

He placed this in tension with what he calls Thanatos, the self-destructive or death instinct that drives entropy. In physics, entropy generally describes the dispersal of energy. In everyday terms, we often use it to describe the tendency of things to move toward disorder, as organized structures require energy and maintenance to preserve.

Examples being: a cluttered room, a neglected inbox, an overcommitted calendar, real lack of day to day structure. In a business context it could present as gradually acquiring offerings, obligations, and processes that no longer serve its original purpose. Our attention becomes distributed across so many open loops that we can no longer identify where our energy is actually going.

If Eros represents the force that moves us toward creation, connection, and vitality, then discernment becomes one of the structures through which we can support that force, rather than falling into states of entropy. The objective is not simply to have more energy but to become increasingly intentional about where that energy goes.

We often associate creativity with expansion, abundance, possibility, and the generation of something new. But perhaps the capacity to create also depends on our willingness to remove, reduce, edit, and occasionally destroy what no longer belongs.

PRACTICAL PRACTICES FOR SUPPORTING EROS

To support your own life force in tangible, ordinary ways, particularly during periods when your attention feels fragmented or your creative output begins to lose its vitality:

• Move your body - feel the experience of being alive, inhabit it

• Eating and sleeping well, drink hot tea, and allow ordinary rituals of care to become part of the creative process

• Remove distractions and create periods of uninterrupted attention in which an idea has enough room to develop beyond its initial spark

• Reduce consumption (screen time, shopping, scrolling, or the endless accumulation of other people’s ideas and images, etc.)

• Spend time in environments, relationships, and experiences that generate curiosity, pleasure, and connection (you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with)

• Make something without immediately assigning it a function or commercial outcome (play with creative process based in impulse)

These practices are investments in the conditions from which meaningful creation becomes possible.

PRACTICAL PRACTICES FOR REDUCING ENTROPY

On the other side of this equation is the more structural work of reducing the accumulation of disorder, unfinished commitments, and unnecessary demands on our attention.

• Reorganize furniture, clear surfaces, and remove anything that feels stagnant or no longer contributes to the higher experience of a space

• Schedule a digital hygiene day: clear your inbox, declutter files and desktop, sync accounts, organize photos into albums, and set up AI agents for mindless task work

• Time blocking: using task- or project-based calendar scheduling to give meaningful work an actual place to exist with buffering space (task-switching destroys executive functioning. I try to focus on one project or client per day)

• Following through on things you said you were going to do. If it feels expired, remove it from the field and acknowledge your focus has moved elsewhere and you are choosing to no longer do the thing.

• Review the projects, collaborations, subscriptions, obligations, and relationships that continue to occupy space in your life, and asking whether they are still in alignment with the person you are becoming.

• Create a list on your phone to hold ideas without requiring every idea to become an active project. Sometimes recording a possibility is enough to release the mental responsibility of carrying it. (I like to create lists on my phone for this as a dumping zone).

A season of creative discernment

Lastly, of course it is no coincidence that I am thinking about all of this in the fall.

In the transition of autumn, a season associated with harvest, discernment, letting go of burdens, and spiritual reflection, the landscape begins to surrender the abundance it has spent months producing, and what remains becomes visible as the excess falls away.

The fading landscape also points toward mortality and the necessity of dying to self, while carrying within it the promise of resurrection and future renewal. Becoming often requires us to rigorously relinquish parts of an identity we may have spent years constructing. Sometimes the business we imagined building is no longer the business we want to operate. Sometimes the creative practice that once gave us enormous pleasure has become an obligation, or the ambitions we organized our lives around no longer feel like our own. And sometimes, perhaps most painfully, we have to allow a version of ourselves to expire before we have any clear understanding of what will take its place.

There is an enormous amount of life force tied up in maintaining things that have already run their course. Ideas we are no longer excited about, commitments we are reluctant to disappoint someone by abandoning, identities we continue performing because they have become familiar to the people around us. I wonder how much of our creative exhaustion is actually the result of trying to keep all of these things alive simultaneously.

As the season changes, I am asking myself what it would mean to harvest what has been learned, appreciate what has been created, and allow certain possibilities to die without interpreting their departure as failure. To clear the creative field. Because I want to be more available to the things that genuinely deserve my life force.

We have been developing the creative premise for The Rhinecliff for months, although, like most true artistic expressions, it has revealed itself incrementally rather than arriving fully formed. The concept being each of our nine guest rooms, and commons spaces, will be built around a centerpiece work, or body of work, by a thoughtfully selected artist from the Hudson Valley region.

The space is designed in response to the art (vs. art selected to match a finished room). This distinction matters to me: hotels have become astonishingly good at creating an aesthetic and then filling every surface with the evidence of how cool they are. The artwork is treated as just a layer of styling: something selected because the colors work, because the dimensions work, or because it reinforces a world that has already been decided. I wanted to reverse the hierarchy.

If this hotel is meant to offer an encounter with the extraordinary creative density of the Hudson Valley, then the artists shouldn’t be brought in at the end to decorate our idea, their work should be informing it. The guest experience is then an act of discovery itself.

IN RESIDENCE: MATTHEW JOHNSON

I am honored to introduce the first selected artist for a guest room! Matthew Johnson’s photographs are utter dreamscapes, created by a mixture of in-camera techniques and mixed-media post-treatments.

Matt lives in Taghanic, New York but there is also a serendipitous Aspen connection, of course! Matt’s work was among the relatively small collection of pieces selected for MOLLIE Aspen, a property for which I was Dreamweaver, before moving east. I didn’t actually meet him there, instead we happened to meet last winter after I moved to the Hudson Valley, in a completely unrelated setting. Only later did we discover that our creative lives had already crossed paths — I love when life does this.

Matt and I selected two large-format works for Suite 204, and from that point forward, the photographs became the scope.

I started pulling them apart visually: Warm greens, yellows, deep blue. Small beats of lilac and orange. The softness and distortion of the imagery itself are tranquil and rich.

For the walls I chose ‘ARAME’ by Alkemis Paint, and from there, materials, objects, textiles and smaller gestures can begin responding to the same language. [BTW Alkemis is a very cool, mineral based, non-toxic ‘wellness’ paint company. The paint went on in this gorgeous chalky texture, and because mineral paint tends to be thicker, applies efficiently. Their colors are endlessly fun and I’m really excited to use them across the property].

The finished product for the room will still take about 2 more months to complete (curtains, framing, trim work and bathroom renovation are all still on the task list for completion), but with a few small changes we have transformed the room quickly! It’s still “in rotation” for guests, and we will install improvements in phases, as ready.

Rather than designing all nine rooms at once, ordering everything, and executing the renovation in one enormous sweep, I’ve decided to move through them one at a time, slowly and responsively. They say good design takes time, and every day I spend inside this building reveals another layer of information to me: how the light moves through a room at different hours, the functionality, what feels empty, what feels excessive, the seasonal changes, and the possibility I simply couldn’t see last week.. There is an intimacy with a space.

So, Room 204 is becoming something of a prototype (not necessarily aesthetically, because each room will take its direction from its own artwork), but in terms of process. I am learning what creates impact, where money matters, where it doesn’t, what can be preserved, what needs to be replaced, and how remarkably different a room can feel through a few strategic interventions rather than an indiscriminate, heavy-handed-developer-overhaul.

There is a business decision in this too — in which the rooms will fund their own evolution through the hotel’s cash flow. Instead of a giant budget giving me permission to replace everything, I have to pay much closer attention to what is already here, and ask what relatively small number of decisions will create the greatest transformation. Constraints always lead to deeper creativity.

And perhaps this is becoming part of the design philosophy itself: less renovation for the sake of renovation, more observation before intervention. Let the building reveal itself, let the artwork introduce the language, let the guests teach us how the rooms actually function. Spend where spending materially changes the experience, and leave alone what doesn’t need our interference.

It means the hotel will remain, for a while, a living work in progress. You may stay in a room in November and return six months later to find it has evolved. There is no dramatic before-and-after reveal coming; there is simply a becoming.

STUDIO VISITS: SEPTEMBER

JORDAN ROSENOW

📍SAUGERTIES, NY

Jordan Rosenow is an Exhibition Technician at Dia:Beacon, and has built a home studio to make sculpture and three dimensional etching and wood-blocks. We brought home a small aluminum-etched block for one of our guest rooms, and have 2 additional commissions currently in the works with them (one for our guest lobby, and another for our outdoor sculpture garden).

AARON GETMAN-PICKERING

📍KINGSTON, NY

Aaron Getman-Pickering is a self-taught woodworker claiming an incredible niche for himself in the collectible design-lighting space. His “lampshades” are razor thin, turned and punched with a delicacy typically reserved for a material lighter than wood. His totem-esque floor lamps stand taller than the user, and carry added textural marks of the craftsman.

IN THE PRESS

It’s hard to even “recap” the density of what I’ve been moving through. Deeply personal shifts are taking place on many fronts, and I have found myself without the usual distance I need to understand or translate what something means while I am still living through it.

Things are changing, profoundly, but I don’t yet have the language for what is being dismantled, what is being made, or who exactly I will be on the other side of it. And it has deeply affected my ability to show up online, or even to translate any of it for sharing. Which is tough for me, because so much of my creative process happens here, with you.

Whether you realize it or not, your witness is part of my creative unfolding. Through (story)telling, I understand my life by noticing it, turning it over, finding the thread, and eventually bringing that thread here. When I am not sharing, it feels as though the story becomes strangely lonely and untold, as if something has happened but has not yet been made fully real through the act of being witnessed. This is not performative witness, but truth telling. Alchemy.

There are seasons when we are able to narrate our lives beautifully, and there are seasons when we are simply living them. When the material is still too close, too tender, too unfinished to turn into anything useful, or when transformation is not yet wisdom because it is still transformation.

So without much else to say currently, I am simply breaking the barrier of my own silence and asking you to see me here, at this deep and transmutative threshold.

I don’t have a neat ending, or a thread to tie back to creativity or business or branding or becoming. I am not even entirely sure what story I am in yet. Hopefully, there will be more to flow out of me soon, when I have had enough time and space to organize myself around what is changing. I suspect there will be a lot to say.

But for now, perhaps being witnessed in the becoming is enough.

Love, Michaela

P.S. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I have found myself with space for one new brand strategy client. If your summer energy is winding down and you need support settling into a more focused season, I’d love to hear what you’re building!

P.P.S. Fundraising for the hotel has officially begun. I’m raising $50k from 10 humans who want to be part of what we are building here in the Hudson Valley. If something in that sentence sparks your curiosity, reply and I’ll share more.

1. Harvested peaches from a tree on the hotel property

2. A studio visit with Catherine Howe

3. Material combinations at the Rhinecliff

4. A monarch butterfly; resilience

1. A central artwork at the hotel by my late godmother Susan Kleinberg; in situ with samples

2. Materials for a guest room

3. Color and texture inspiration; strength, fragmentation, tension

4. Mural work by painter Morgane Richer La Fleche - commissioned artist for works at the Rhinecliff

A few fun factoids to begin.

1. This event is being produced by my genius mother. She is one of the most intellectually fierce, engaged-with-life, and stylish women I have ever had the privilege of knowing; yet alone! the privilege of having her as a mother and my ultimate guide through earth school. She is a forever learner — insatiable! This event is (one of her many) gifts to the world and the generations to come. By disseminating the complex and often illegible (to us normies) contemporary philosophical understandings of the universe and consciousness, her prayer is that we may (should we accept) become more accountable to the aliveness within us, yes, but more importantly to aliveness of the natural and, now, artificial worlds… (Can you imagine what the dinner table conversations were like growing up?)

2. Last spring, in the event’s inaugural year, she invited me to create the graphic for this event. The brief: to express the divine creativity and deep knowledge of the universe, but to articulate it through… a logo! Sure, no problem! When we started working on imagery and pulling inspiration, it was shaping up to look less cosmically inspired, and more like an outdated middle-school science textbook. When we took a left turn towards the mysticism and the unknown… it started to click. Divine creativity, meets philosophy, meets science, and beyond! The result is below. How did we do?

3. Last year’s symposium + the following patron dinner sold out — so please pay attention!:

   1. If you are a human (✔️) with a sense of curiosity, and even a shred of a sense of accountability, this event is for you.

   2. If you are a human who loves animals, or at the very least, you love your dog, this event is for you.

   3. If you have ever wondered why we are here, on this spinning rock in the middle of a vast universe we know practically nothing about!, this event is for you.

   4. If you have faith (or inversely, have lost faith!) in humanity, and our ability to do/be better, this event is for you.

With love, see you in Aspen 🌀😎🐙

Frontiers of Knowledge Symposium 2026
Consciousness in the Living World

Join us on Sunday, August 23 for Frontiers of Knowledge, which will bring together internationally recognized scientists, philosophers, authors, and thought leaders to explore one of humanity’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human in a world of infinite intelligences? This year’s theme, “Consciousness in the Living World,” examines the intersections of human consciousness, animal intelligence, and artificial intelligence through a full day of inspiring talks and conversations at Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House.

A $100 Day Pass includes access to the complete symposium, while the $350 Patron Pass extends the experience with an exclusive evening reception, seated dinner, drinks, entertainment, and the opportunity to connect with speakers and fellow attendees. Whether you’re curious about science, philosophy, technology, or the future of our world, Frontiers of Knowledge offers an unforgettable day of ideas and conversation. Learn more and reserve your tickets today at frontiersofknowledge.org.

Cover Image: A digital art concept, Bloomy uses 3D scanning to create designs for fashion applications.

BUILDING IS HARD. It asks you to make decisions without all the information, solve problems you’ve never seen before, and to keep showing up when it would be much easier to quit. And today was one of those days where I questioned everything (as we pumped 8” of rainwater out of our boiler room, which was only just the beginning).

But tonight, as I decompress with a movie and a snuggle-fest with my little one, I am revisiting a list of wins we have collected this week to re-ground into the why. My list of “proof” helps me stay focused on the generative movement that is so prevalent in this project, and feel exciting enough to share…

This week’s ✨evidence✨:

• We are running 95% occupancy on a week to week basis

• We received our first 2 buy-out inquiries for next summer season

• We have received 3 wedding inquiries (both this and the above are incredibly validating as we are not yet even repositioned/reopened into our full concept yet!)

• We had 100+ artists submit to our Open Call, to create unique artworks, objects, furnishings, etc. for each area of the hotel in the first 24 hours of launching

• Which led to 500+ Instagram follower growth

• We are planting seeds (with positive early signs of possible blooms), for a restaurant partner (🌱 if this is of interest - please reach out!)

The highs don’t erase the lows; the lows don’t invalidate the highs. As founders, our job isn’t to avoid hard days but to become the kind of people who can hold both realities at once.

I realized not one item on the list of “wins” were made in isolation. They bloomed through partnership, connection, relationship, conversation, outreach, inbounds… So why do we all insist on carrying the hardest parts of building by ourselves?

Then a truth I have earned after many years of entrepreneurship resurfaced, subtle yet obvious once distilled: a founder's greatest competitive advantage is the company you keep. Proximity to people who:

• reflect your essence,

• ask better questions,

• resource your creation process,

• challenge your assumptions,

• normalize the hard days,

• celebrate the wins,

• and keep you moving when you’d otherwise spiral

My brand strategy clients are incredible builders. As I amsitting in their corner, helping guide, facilitate, and tease out their vision, their essence, and then giving it structure..truly building alongside them, it breathes creative energy back into my own building process.

So... I’m trying something completely new. I want to invite a small group of fellow builders into that same nourishing process…to create and build, among great company.

Introducing [The Brand Lab]: Sunday Strategy Circle

Where: Zoom

When: 2 hours every Sunday

Duration: 8 weeks

Content: 8 building principles, explored through live discussion, founder spotlights, and collaborative problem-solving

1. What are you actually building? (Essence)

2. Positioning & differentiation (Essence)

3. Offer architecture & business modeling (Structure)

4. Customer journey & experience design (Structure)

5. Brand visual language (Expression)

6. Marketing & systems (Expression)

7. Founder decision-making

8. Goals, action, and next steps

Who: Founders, entrepreneurs, creatives, and builders at any stage. Applications are reviewed and selected based on the strongest fit for the collective group.

Commitment: Tuition will be offered on a sliding scale and discussed during a 30-minute founder introduction call.

APPLY

Applications Open Now | Doors Close August 12th | Begins August 16

For weeks, I’ve been making mental notes of things I wanted to share with you. My intention was to offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it feels like to build a small hotel, to document the brand decisions, the business decisions, and the beautiful, messy reality of bringing an idea into the world. But now that I’m finally sitting down to write, they’ve all evaporated into the bigness of this experience.

The details are so finite. Fleeting. Fast-moving. Every day we’re making what feels like a thousand decisions…some are obvious, others are so small and internal they’re barely perceived. But there is a constant orientation towards the vision.

In the density of these early building days, I am not only reconnecting to, but leading with, the creative core: my intuition. I find myself centering my reasoning around, “Because my intuition told me.” Period.

There is no story, no reasoning or justification, except that my intuition told me. I’ve begun to trust that voice more than my need to explain it. There is an intelligence available to us that exists before reason arrives, and before we can defend it. So much of creating is simply learning to hear it.

I’m herby outsourcing my decision making to the divine. I’m walking around with a direct line to god. This sweet little all-knowing voice that’s now part of my everyday creation process. And the more I listen, the chattier she gets! “Nope.” Or “turn left.” Or “email them today.” The best part?… she’s always right.

I wonder how many stories we build afterward to justify what we already knew. Can you allow your intuition to be the ultimate source?

Some examples of my intuition being the driver…

• Capital Turns out I invested almost the exact amount of money we needed to get this little hotel operational. We’ve built a much larger upgrades budget, but my intuition keeps nudging me that there may be another way. Not cheaper for the sake of cheaper, but more creative. So instead of driving into our fundraise, I find myself asking, “What am I not seeing yet?”

• Opening early Anyone could have made the argument to wait until everything was perfect. Instead, we opened for the summer. That decision has given us two months of revenue and profitability, hundreds of guest interactions, and the opportunity to refine our operations while the stakes are still relatively small. We’ve learned more in 52 days than we could have learned in six months of planning.

• Pricing There have been several moments where we’ve increased room rates before we felt “ready” or “justified.” It just… felt right. And every time, the market met us there.

I don’t think intuition tells me what to do…I think it tells me where to look. My experience and earned wisdom as a builder and operator still do a lot of the heavy lifting. But they’ve recently saddled up with a new partner: the divine.

In summation: intuition isn’t a substitute for competence. It’s what allows competence to become wisdom. Earn the skills - then let your intuition aim them.

Some recent design inspiration for our Commons (&Cafe)

Follow along on Instagram, and use code ‘SUBLOVE’ for 10% off direct bookings

I’ve always built things.
Sometimes they were communities, or hospitality concepts.
Sometimes they were collections of craft and beauty.
And sometimes they were brands.
Now, it’s a 9-room inn.

The medium changes, but the design questions have remained consistent:

While The Rhinecliff (our little hotel in upstate NY we are slowly bringing back to life) may be the most visible chapter of my life right now, I remain deeply engaged in my consulting practice. Behind the scenes, I have the privilege of working closely with founders and operators who bring me in as a strategic partner, creative brand designer, entrepreneurial advisor, or simply someone to help see around corners.

If you’re building something meaningful and could use a trusted partner to help: clarify the vision, strengthen the strategy, and bring the next chapter into focus, I’d love to hear from you.

Here are some of the amazing businesses I have been supporting this quarter past…

A longevity studio defining a new category: VOSK

The VOSK Center is a wellness eco-system designed as a new model for performance and longevity. Their facility on 57th & Madison includes state-of-the-art equipment (typically reserved for professional athletes, astronauts, and the like), with recovery amenities (sauna, steam, cold plunge, and sensory deprivation float) that recognize recovery as essential as training itself.

Membership is intentionally limited to just 150 people. Each member receives a personalized program anchored by at least two one-on-one sessions per week, alongside tailored longevity protocols that may include advanced lab work, peptides, IV therapy, and other evidence-informed interventions. The result is an environment where members train shoulder-to-shoulder with some of Midtown’s highest performers, both physically and professionally.

We’re currently in soft-launch, welcoming founding members (who receive a waived initiation fee), while preparing for a series of summer events ahead of our official launch this September (sexy NYC location announcement coming soon).

My role + contribution: Membership design and strategy

A bathhouse creating sanctuary in Brooklyn: Marshlands

Marshlands is a contrast therapy bathhouse and social club opening in DUMBO, Brooklyn in 2027, designed as a place to restore the nervous system as much as it is to bring people together. Centered around hot and cold contrast, the experience expands into IV therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, red light therapy, and thoughtfully designed spaces for conversation, quiet work, and lingering over coffee or a glass of wine. Every detail, from the architecture and programming to the food, rituals, and pace of the experience, will be designed to create a sense of belonging while offering a meaningful pause from the intensity of city life.

We’re currently in the earliest stages of bringing Marshlands to life, growing the founding waitlist, developing the concept, and preparing to share much more as we move toward opening.

My role + contribution: Brand identity, graphic design, language, positioning, and early market testing

A beauty brand rediscovering its hero product: Antedotum

Antedotum is repositioning its sunscreen with a focused philosophy: fewer, better products that support healthy skin through clean ingredients, beautiful formulation, and everyday intelligent exposure.

Founded in Aspen, the modern skincare collection combines plant-powered ingredients with science-backed formulations, creating products that simplify daily routines without compromising efficacy. The brand’s hero product, Essential Daily Sunscreen, is a lightweight mineral SPF 30 formulated with zinc oxide, vitamin C, and its signature Aspen Bark Complex to protect against UVA, UVB, and blue light while hydrating the skin with a natural, satin finish.

My role + contribution: Website rebuild (not yet live), repositioning + relaunch, language and market positioning, graphic design

A founder translating an idea into a financial model: Dakota & Friends

Dakota + Friends is a children’s toy bringing a thoughtful creative vision to market through a beautifully designed product that celebrate imagination, play, and connection. Our work together has centered on translating that vision into a viable business: developing the financial model, refining the business strategy, and building the operational foundation required to support sustainable growth through product development into launch.

My role + contribution: Early stage financial modeling + strategy

An artist returning to self: Brandon Perlman Photography

Strategic advisor for Brandon as he transitioned from a commercial media professional working behind the scenes to launching his fine art photography practice. Together, we clarified his positioning, developed his go-to-market strategy, identified launch opportunities, and built the strategic foundation for introducing his personal body of work to collectors and the broader art world.

My role + contribution: Direction and strategy

A podcast exploring transitions: Between Places

Brand strategy and creative direction for a new podcast exploring life’s transitions through conversations with founders, creatives, and seekers. My work includes developing the brand identity and visual language, designing core marketing assets, shaping the go-to-market strategy, and creating the episode architecture to establish a distinctive editorial voice and a cohesive listener experience from launch onward.

My role + contribution: Brand identity, graphic design, market strategy, episode architecture and planning.

Building something meaningful can be exhilarating, but it doesn’t have to be done alone. If you’re looking for more structure, clearer direction, a trusted collaborator, or a brand that feels as intentional as the work behind it, I’d be honored to help bring it to life.

A self-guided starting point:
If you’re in the early stages or simply enjoy working through ideas yourself the Brand Building Workbook distills my approach into a guided framework for developing a more thoughtful, cohesive, and enduring brand.

Buildings need to evolve to remain useful; we believe repairs and updates should hold reverence for the future users. Rather than trying to disguise the imperfections, we wanted a solution that acknowledged the building’s age while adding something thoughtful and new.

We were drawn to the idea of using copper patches to repair some of our damaged floorboards, similar to the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi, the repair becomes part of the story rather than something hidden from view

The result is delightful! The warm metal catches the light, complements the aged wood, and creates a repair that honors the integrity of the materials. It reminds me of the Shaker approach to design: their guiding philosophy was that "beauty rests on utility,” meaning that if an object was designed perfectly to serve its intended function and made with honest, high-quality craftsmanship, its appearance would naturally be beautiful. Bingo!

For those curious to try it themselves, here’s exactly how we repaired our 170-year-old floorboards with hand-cut copper patches:

For our copper floor patches, we used relatively simple materials and hand tools to create a durable, honest repair that felt appropriate to a 170-year-old building.

Materials

• 20 oz copper sheeting (they make varying sheet sizes)

• Copper nails

• Big-gap filler

• Fine steel wool

• Liver of sulver *optional for aging the copper:

• Soft rag

Tools

• Metal sheers

• Drill and drill bits

• Hammer

• Work gloves

• Hand saw or multi-tool

Prep the copper sheeting

Fresh copper is beautiful, but it can feel a little too bright against worn floorboards. We wanted our patches to feel like they belonged in the building, or at least to give nature a head start. To accelerate the aging process, we treated the copper sheeting with liver of sulfur, a traditional metal patination solution that darkens copper and encourages the rich browns, charcoals, and subtle variations that would otherwise take years to develop naturally.

After cleaning the copper with water and drying it with a soft cloth, I lightly textured the surface using fine steel wool. This step isn’t strictly necessary, but I found it helped break the uniform sheen of the new copper and gave the liver of sulfur a bit more surface to grab onto, resulting in a richer, more varied patina.

Next, dilute the liver of sulfur in a cup of warm water. As it dissolves, the water will take on a yellow hue. Once fully mixed, dip a soft rag into the solution and wipe it directly onto the copper.

The reaction happens quickly. With each application, the copper will deepen in color, moving from bright orange to warm browns, charcoal tones, and subtle iridescent variations. If you’d like a darker finish, simply apply additional layers, allowing the patina to develop gradually until you reach the desired look.

Once you’re happy with the color, rinse the copper thoroughly with clean water to stop the reaction. Pat dry with a soft cloth and allow the sheet to dry completely before moving on to fabrication.

Remember: slight inconsistencies, fingerprints, streaks, and tonal shifts are part of what makes the finished patch feel authentic alongside centuries-old wood.

Filling the gaps + measuring your patches

Before you can install the copper, you need something beneath it. The copper patch isn’t intended to span a void on its own. Instead, we’re creating a solid backing that provides counter-pressure and prevents the metal from flexing or sinking into the damaged area over time.

For narrow gaps and irregular voids, we used a large-gap expanding filler. If you’re repairing a larger hole, I would use a scrap wood plank or wood blocking to fill the majority of the cavity first (it doesn’t need to match the original flooring, no one will ever see it).

Apply the filler generously and allow it to fully cure overnight. Once cured, use a hand saw, oscillating multi-tool, or sharp utility knife to trim away the excess. One of the advantages of gap filler is how easy it is to shape and sculpt after it hardens. Work until the repair sits flush with the surrounding floorboards.

With the void filled and trimmed, it’s time to create your patch. Lay your copper sheet over the repair area and begin rough-cutting the shape using metal shears or tin snips. Leave at least one inch of coverage beyond the damaged area on all sides, ensuring the patch fully spans the circumference of the repair and extends onto solid wood.

One of the things we love about this approach is that the repairs aren’t hidden, they’re celebrated. Let the shape respond to the damage rather than forcing it into a perfect geometric form.

Applying your patches

Once you’re happy with the fit of your copper patch, it’s time to fasten it permanently to the floor. Start by placing a single anchoring nail through the patch to hold it in position. I found it easiest to begin at one of the longer north-south ends of the patch, where the copper was most likely to lift or shift while working.

Because copper is such a soft metal, you’ll want to pre-drill every hole before driving in your nails. Using a drill bit slightly smaller than the nail shaft, drill through the copper and into the floor below, then gently sink the copper nail with a hammer.

When I first started, I would pre-drill and nail each hole one at a time. As I became more comfortable with the process, I found a faster rhythm: set the patch, install the anchoring nail, then pre-drill the remaining holes around the perimeter before returning to drive the nails. Work your way around the circumference of the patch, spacing nails evenly and allowing the copper to settle naturally against the floor.

We chose 20 oz copper because it is substantial enough to withstand foot traffic while still being workable with hand tools. Its really important to hammer down the edging once all of your nails are in, to level the copper to the floor for a smooth transition.

One practical note: the hammering is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) loud. Copper nails drive easily, but the sound resonates through old floors and framing. Unless you’re trying to make enemies of your family, guests, or neighbors, this is not a project to tackle in the middle of the night.

Final Thoughts

One of the things we’ve come to appreciate about stewarding a 170-year-old building is that every repair is a choice. You can erase the evidence of time, or you can work with it.

The Rhinecliff spent decades accumulating quick fixes, mismatched materials, and repairs that prioritized convenience over character. We don’t say that with judgment, every generation leaves its mark on a building. Ours just happens to be a chapter focused on thoughtful restoration and honest craftsmanship.

These copper patches won’t fool anyone into thinking the floor is original, but they acknowledge the damage, celebrate the repair, and add a new layer to the story of the building. A hundred years from now, someone else will walk across these floors and know exactly where another caretaker intervened and paused long enough to leave something beautiful behind.

If you’re restoring an old home, workshop, barn, or inn, we hope this inspires you to think differently about repair. And send us your copper patching photos if you tackle this simple and transformative repair technique!

I want to share this process because it’s every bit as fascinating from the inside as it is from the outside. And as someone who has dreamed of having a hotel of my own, I want to document the experience for anyone who shares that dream (which, as I’ve learned over the past few weeks, is more of you than I realized), or for anyone simply curious.

The footnote version: it’s a lot of work. But I probably didn’t need to tell you that.

Barry and I have officially rejoined the 100-hour-work-week club, gleefully, as we embark on the project of a lifetime. Nonetheless, tired.

Someone asked me, what motivated you to take this on?

We are OFFICIALLY taking bookings for this summer in our phase 01 rooms!

Know anyone traveling to the Hudson Valley this summer? or craving a change of scenery? USE CODE: ‘SUBLOVE’ to receive 10% off your booking (this discount is exclusive to my readers because I love you).

Note: We are currently operating as a rooms-only property as we plan our commons (to include community gathering “living room,” coffee bar, and full restaurant/bar) for a summer 2027 opening.

BOOK NOW

The challenges this week

Industry folks will know this already, but if you don’t: the hotel booking and distribution world is completely nuts. I feel like I’ve learned five new languages in the last two weeks alone. We chose to use a channel manager (we went with ‘Little Hotelier’) which allows us to list our rooms across multiple booking platforms while managing everything from a single dashboard.

In theory, it’s brilliant. In practice, there is still an astonishing amount of manual work happening behind the scenes. Rates don’t always map correctly, room inventory occasionally develops a mind of its own, payment preferences selected by guests don’t always transfer cleanly from one platform to another, guest messaging systems promise to centralize communication, but often seem determined to do the opposite. What appears to guests as a simple, seamless booking experience is actually a web of connections between booking engines, channel managers, payment processors, websites, online travel agencies, and property management systems - all speaking slightly different dialects and occasionally refusing to speak to one another at all.

[The platforms I am all-too-intimately-enmeshed, aka my tech-stack: Little Hotelier, Booking.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb, HotelsTonight, Whatsapp (which I’ve learned is owned by Meta), Instagram, Facebook, Stripe, Squarespace, Google Business, Gmail, Quickbooks … with only more to come as we hit our stride]

The good news is that every day the system gets a little cleaner and a little more automated. The bad news is that I now find myself casually using phrases like “channel mapping” or “PCI compliance” in everyday conversation.

We’re currently locked out of our Google Business listing. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of navigating Google’s user experience, you’ll understand the challenge immediately. Google doesn’t exactly have a customer service department you can call when things go sideways. As a result, when someone searches “Rhinecliff Hotel” or even “hotels in Rhinebeck” our property is currently showing up as Permanently Closed. Not ideal.

Most guests are reassured once they hear from us directly, but I completely understand the hesitation. If I booked a hotel and Google insisted it no longer existed, I’d probably have a few questions too. The unfortunate reality is that we’ve lost some reservations because of it.

The fortunate reality is that the hotel is very much open, our guests are very much arriving, and we’re slowly working our way through the labyrinth of verification requests, ownership claims, and support forums required to convince Google of this fact. In the meantime, if you happen to search for us and see that we’re “permanently closed,” I can assure you that both the hotel and its owners are very much alive.

We sprung a leak in the office. The source isn’t obvious, which means we’re currently gathering bids from plumbers who will likely need to open up portions of the ceiling and play detective until they find the culprit. Thankfully, it wasn’t in a guest room, so bookings and operations could continue uninterrupted. Small mercies.

What we’re beginning to appreciate on a very practical level is the reality of managing a property of this size. There is always something demanding attention: landscaping, mechanical systems, repairs, preventative maintenance, vendor management, inspections, and the thousand small details that guests never see but that make a property function. Both Barry and I are no strangers to managing brick-and-mortar hospitality spaces, a 12,000-square-foot commercial property? Different beast.

Every day seems to present new puzzles to solve, a new system to understand, or a new skill to acquire. It’s equal parts exhilarating and humbling.

Fortunately, I seem to enjoy learning things the hard way.

Alongside the hotel opening, I am continuing to work closely with a small group of private Creative Strategy clients.

Balancing client work with the realities of opening a hotel has, unsurprisingly, had me burning the candle at both ends. My clients have been extraordinarily patient, supportive, and understanding as we’ve crossed this threshold, for which I am deeply grateful.

One of the things I value most in my work is presence. I want to show up with energy, attention, creativity, and genuine care. And if I’m honest, dividing my attention between a small hotel opening and my client work has stretched my nervous system and overall capacity more than once over the past few weeks.

That said, I wouldn’t necessarily see it a negative thing. I often talk about the importance of expanding our capacity, and it would be a bit hypocritical if I only believed that in theory. Growth requires friction; new levels of responsibility require new levels of resilience. While I certainly wouldn’t choose to operate at this pace indefinitely, there is something valuable about discovering that you can hold more than you thought you could.

Thankfully, beginning Monday, we should settle into a more sustainable rhythm. The property is largely prepared for summer guests, many of the major opening tasks are behind us, and we can begin shifting from launch mode into management. At least until the next surprise arrives.

Wins this week!

We passed our fire inspection on Monday, passed our health inspection on Wednesday, and then moved straight into a sold-out weekend on Friday (e!x!h!a!l!e). Not a bad way to start. The reality, of course, is that hospitality is a game of consistency, not just busy weekends. In order to reach our financial targets, we need to fill rooms Monday through Wednesday as well, and reaching a sustainable 50% occupancy rate remains a primary focus.

That said, we’ve already received more than 50 bookings through the summer within just a few days of opening. For a project that existed only in our imaginations a matter of weeks ago, this has felt incredibly validating.

Building anything new requires a certain amount of faith. You make decisions with incomplete information. You invest time, energy, and resources long before there is evidence that anyone will care. Fifty bookings doesn’t mean we’ve figured it all out but it does feel like a wink from the universe that we’re onto something.

Right now, we’re prioritizing learning. We’ve intentionally priced the rooms below market. At this stage, the rooms are not yet what they will become, and while we have a much larger vision for the property, many improvements are still ahead of us. Because of that, our strategy this summer is simple: sell the room before we optimize the room.

Or, as the hospitality industry likes to say: heads in beds.

We want guests in the building. We want feedback. We want to understand who is coming, why they’re booking, what they love, and where we can improve. The encouraging part is that the feedback so far has been remarkably consistent. Guests have described the rooms as bright, clean, and comfortable. Nearly everyone comments on the river views and convenient location. And perhaps most validating of all, several friends and guests have independently mentioned that they would have expected to pay closer to $250 per night for the existing experience, compared to our current baseline rate of $165.

They are small but meaningful signals that the value people are experiencing already exceeds the value we’re currently charging for. And that’s exactly where we’d hoped to begin.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected, positive, learning curve has been learning how to work together while also being in a relationship together. Barry is a verbal processor (he likes to talk through everything in detail ahead of time); I am a feeling processor (I feel and sense my way into things intuitively in the moment); oy.

You can imagine how well this works at times. Or doesn’t. The reality is that opening a hotel together has accelerated our communication lessons considerably. There is nowhere to hide when you’re making hundreds of decisions a week, solving problems in real time, and sharing both a business and a life.

We’re learning each other’s operating systems, discovering when one person needs more discussion, when the other needs more space, and how to meet somewhere in the middle. And we’re truly getting the hang of it!

Anyone who has ever built something alongside their life partner knows that this piece is foundational. The quality of the communication affects everything else (the business, the stress, the joy). The hotel may be the visible thing we’re building, but behind the scenes, we’re building new ways of understanding each other, too.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of the last three weeks has been the outpouring of community. Both locally and online, our world has expanded overnight. Creatives, hoteliers, investors, artists, entrepreneurs, neighbors, friends, and complete strangers have emerged from the woodwork to offer support, encouragement, introductions, advice, resources, collaboration, and genuine enthusiasm for what we’re building.

There are long hours, endless decisions, and plenty of moments where we’re simply hoping we made the right call. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how many people would lean in to say, “I’m rooting for you.”

THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU.

While I plan to share much more of the design inspiration, creative vision, and renovation process in the coming months, this particular letter is mostly administrative, because well… that’s the reality.

The truth is that entrepreneurship often looks a lot less like mood boards and grand visions, and a lot more like spreadsheets, inspections, plumbing leaks, software integrations, permit applications, and running to the hardware store 10 minutes before a guest is set to arrive.

Social media has conditioned us to only share the polished parts. But I’m increasingly interested in the messy middle! That’s is the real-real, baby!

Thank you for being here with us at the beginning.
If you’re not following us already, show us some love on the gram.

xx MC

The last week has brought an outpouring of support, encouragement, introductions, recommendations, resources, and stories from this community. We’ve received notes from hoteliers, designers, artists, operators, and people just simply cheering us on!

The overwhelming feeling on our end is gratitude. As Barry and I step into stewardship of this property, we feel incredibly honored.

A few frequently asked questions have surfaced over the last week, so I thought I’d answer them here:

FOLLOW RHINECLIFF

Day 1:

We got the keys. That evening, after the lawyers, signatures, bank wires, logistics, and adrenaline had finally settled, Barry and I carried two chairs into the empty room we’ve started calling the living room and watched the sun disappear behind the Hudson. There was almost nothing in the space. Just the two of us sitting in a building that suddenly belonged to our care.

The river is astonishing. The sky seems impossibly large. Barges drift past. The birds are chirping. Everything feels connected to something older and more enduring than whatever urgent thing is happening in my inbox.

For the first time since deciding to do this, we weren’t talking about projections or permits or operating plans. We were simply sitting with the reality of it. A lot of life can change when someone hands you a set of keys.

Day 2:

We spent the day walking every square foot of the property, opening cabinets, peering into storage closets, pulling things from shelves, tracing the decisions of previous owners and previous decades. Buildings are funny that way — they hold imprints of decisions-past. A hotel especially carries layers: one owner adds something, another removes it. Someone paints over a wall, someone closes a door that used to be open. We want to open it back up.

By the end of the day we had created large piles throughout the property, prepped for removal to the transfer station. Removing the old, stepping into the new.

Day 3:

The dump. There is probably a metaphor here about letting go, but honestly it was mostly just multiple trips to the transfer station with a truck full of things that had reached the end of their useful life. Still, there is something satisfying about subtraction.

The romantic version of hospitality development is mood boards and beautiful renderings. The actual version often involves hauling broken furniture and obsolete electronics into a dumpster while sweating through your shirt.

Day 4:

More clearing. More moving. More uncovering.

We emptied closets, relocated furniture, stripped rooms back to their essentials, and tried to create enough visual quiet to actually see what was underneath. I keep finding myself resisting the urge to design too quickly.

Every creative person knows the temptation of arriving with answers before you’ve spent enough time understanding the question. For now, we’re trying to listen more than we speak. The building is slowly revealing itself.

Day 5:

This was the biggest workday so far. We removed outdated televisions from walls, patched drywall, shifted curtain rods throughout the property, treated window framing, and made what felt like an endless procession of trips to the hardware store.

Day 6:

This morning we met with the county health department for an initial walkthrough of the property. We received our marching orders. It went VERY well, which was a big relief — threshold crossed.

Other tasks completed:

• New bedding and curtains arrived.

• Balcony furniture unpacked and delivered to each room.

• Planted some jasmine for our entry.

• We set up the internet account.

Hospitality development turns out to be an endless oscillation between poetry and utility.

Day 7:

Today we started painting the lobby. Because we’ll be welcoming summer guests before the larger renovation begins, we wanted at least one room to feel resolved, a signal that someone is thinking carefully about the experience of arriving here.

I chose Overcast (Sherwin Williams), a warm creamy neutral that envelopes, and made the tricky decision to paint over all the trim and doors. Generally speaking, I don’t condone painting original-wood-anything. But this trim was not original to the building — it was added much later and feels visually disconnected from the architecture surrounding it. So to save this sweet building from bad design decisions, I blasted right over the trim… and I am so happy I did!

I also picked up a beautiful MCM aluminum bar cart from a local antique barn that will become an honor bar and coffee station for summer guests. I’m also bringing a sculptural vase and lamp from home. I’ll find some beautiful art for the walls.

Long term, I’d love to commission a muralist for this space, to create something irreplaceable (like the property) and inspired by the Hudson Valley landscape. I keep returning to the idea that a hotel lobby should flip you into discovery. The moment you step inside should feel different from the moment before it: an invitation into another rhythm, another perspective.

I’d like to document the process of finding this artists (I already have a few leads from my substack community!) and will share with you all how we move through that!

I can’t express enough gratitude for this opportunity. It truly feels like a dream come true to build a little hotel of our very own.

There is also an overwhelming sense of god(dess)’s hand; the universe is in full support of this project. Every day brings a small detail, conversation, coincidence, or introduction that create a deep sense of alignment, showing me this is where I am meant to be.

At the same time, this opportunity was certainly not handed to me. A significant portion of my savings, and a significant portion of my future earnings, will go into this business. Moving our family across the country and trusting in my instincts that something big was waiting for us on the other side. Signing a lease of this size and carrying the responsibility that comes with it is no small thing. All that risk is real.

And yet, I trust myself to hold it. Learning to trust myself to this extent took years of mistakes, accountability, uncomfortable lessons, and choosing to keep going anyway. That trust was earned.

We took a risk many people would be unwilling to take. There are moments of fear, of course, but what I feel most is courage. To live fully. To express. To follow curiosity wherever it leads. To participate in life rather than observe it from a distance. To do the thing and live deeply. Awake.

How do we create places that make people feel more alive inside themselves?
What transforms a space from function into feeling?
What creates belonging?
How do we cultivate beauty as the portal back to ourselves and to one another?

I have explored those questions through design, through hospitality, through gatherings and dinners and brand strategy and community building and countless conversations about atmosphere, ritual, beauty, pacing, intimacy, and the emotional experience of being received.

And now, all of the threads of my life have converged into something miraculous: Barry and I are opening a hotel. Even writing that sentence feels surreal. A historic river hotel in the Hudson Valley, with sweeping views of the Hudson River and beside the train line, just three minutes from our new home.

For those of you who have been here a long time (some of you for over a decade now!!!), you’ve witnessed so many chapters unfold in real time. Maker + Place. Sotheby’s. Local. Here House. Plus+1. My time at MOLLIE. Activating HaiSi and Sway. Community building. Creative pivots. Motherhood. Identity shifts. Burnout. Expansion. Reinvention. A move from Aspen to the Hudson Valley. All of it orbiting around a very particular fascination with how humans gather, connect, rest, celebrate, and experience beauty together.

And Barry, in his own format, has spent his life inside hospitality: Alinea Chicago, MOTO Chicago, Richard Sandoval restaurants; and in Aspen - Steakhouse 316, Monarch Steakhouse, Wild Fig, Aosta, Woody Creek Tavern, Petit Trois, and most recently Amara Carbondale.

Our skills are profoundly complementary: he understands operations, food, systems, kitchens, flow, standards, pressure, and the mechanics of making people feel genuinely taken care of. I understand emotional architecture, narrative, atmosphere., cohesion, experience, design, marketing, the power of a brand promise, and the details that shape how a place feels. [Wilder (6) would like it to be included that his official title for the hotel is “Key Master,” which in his vision “is someone who leads each guest to their room”. Clearly, a vital role in setting the right service tone, whether it’s referred to as bellman or the way cooler-sounding title, Key Master].

The Rhinecliff itself is extraordinary. Strong bones, layered history, old-world river magic that immediately slows your nervous system upon arrival. The wedding lawn overlooking the Hudson, the passing trains below, and the light across the water at dusk, all make this place extremely special and irreplaceable. Just a train ride from NYC, and in close proximity to Rhinebeck, Kingston, Hudson, Woodstock, Germantown, the Catskills and beyond, we’re deeply embedded in a beautiful ecosystem of artists, farmers, designers, antique dealers, musicians, chefs, ceramicists, writers, and the deeply interesting contributors that define this region.

A high-level overview of our special property:

• Built in 1854, has been operating as a hotel since it’s erection

• 9 Rooms featuring original wood flooring and exposed architectural beams

• Perched on the Hudson River, each room has it’s own private patio + river view

• Overlooks the Rhinebeck Amtrak station, only 1.5 Hr trip from NYC

• 5 minute drive from Rhinebeck, NY (home to Bard, CIA Hyde Park, the Aerodrome, Omega Institute, and a soon-to-be SOHO House property)

• Includes a wedding lawn, event and lobby space with attached cafe, full restaurant with massive outdoor dining patio

The property is ideal for:

• Our surrounding local community to connect and enjoy the vibrancy we hope to foster

• City weekenders seeking slowness, beauty, and proximity to nature

• Weddings and multi-day celebrations rooted in intimacy, landscape, and meaningful connection

• Travelers discovering the Hudson Valley, moving between Rhinebeck, Hudson, Kingston, Tivoli, Germantown, and the surrounding river towns

• Creative retreats, workshops, and private group gatherings where the scale of the property allows for full buyouts and deeply personal experiences (hotel rooms accommodate up to 20 guests)

• Design-minded travelers who love the community and cultural energy surrounding places like Soho House but are seeking something more intimate, grounded, and approachable

• Parents and visiting families connected to Bard College and the Culinary Institute of America

• Artists, writers, creatives, and culturally curious travelers looking for a hotel that feels connected to place

The vision is still unfolding, but at its core, we want to create a hotel that feels deeply alive, both stimulating and restorative, offering the sense of discovery we experienced in our own trip to the Hudson River Valley (the same trip during which we decided to move there). We want to share this once in a lifetime journey with the people who have supported us most in every chapter: you!

Follow our new IG profile for more immediate updates and juicy visuals:

FOLLOW RHINECLIFF

While this moment feels incredibly expansive and exciting, and is a project for which we are completely qualified to execute at a high level, I also want to be honest that building something of this scale is both exhilarating and deeply humbling. There are moments where I feel completely certain this is exactly what we are meant to be doing. And then there are moments where we are buried in licensing transfers, operational logistics, fundraising, modeling, insurance requirements, budgets, legal negotiations, and the sheer weight of stewarding something with this much history and possibility.

But even inside the bigness, there is clarity. This project feels like a through-line connecting so many parts of our lives and work that previously existed in separate rooms.

And because so many of you reading this are designers, hoteliers, operators, artists, travelers, architects, aesthetes, founders, cultural obsessives, and people who care deeply about spaces and experiences, I want to invite you into this process with us.

I want your references.
Your favorite hotels.
The places that changed you.
The tiny details that made you feel deeply considered as a guest.
The hard-earned operational lessons.
The rituals you remember.
The amenities or touches of delight you still think about years later.
The brands, makers, craftspeople, systems, designers, and collaborators we should know to help us bring this vision to life.

We take possession on Tuesday (!!!) and will operate the existing rooms (as they are) through the summer while we plan and fundraise for a design-forward refurbishment. In the spring and early summer of 2027, we will re-launch as a fully imagined concept offering creative rooms, lobby and cafe, event + wedding space, retreats + programming, and a full restaurant concept.

Over the coming months I’ll share more of the property history, design inspirations, references, refurbishment process, operational realities, challenges, small victories, discoveries, and the unfolding process of breathing new life into a historic river property we already love deeply.

It feels very big.
And very tender.
And very alive.

Emma’s voice is unique and irreverent. She’s quick, funny, and brings intellectual rigor to her curiosity. You'll get a taste of that here. We immediately starting vibing with each other’s content, which led to a Zoom call. Emma writes about hospitality through a philosophy lens, so naturally we had about a thousand things to talk about.

The first thing I noticed about her Substack was how intentionally she'd built it. She created distinct "rooms" and elements that all thread back to the hospitality theme. Her welcome email subject line reads: Your Room is Ready. I appreciated the attention to detail which directly translated into her warm and curious in-person (on-screen) presence. This co-lab letter is a result of our fun and resonant call. Enjoy.

Follow Emma

Third eyes seem to be opening in the upper echelons of corporate power.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce (valued at $97 billion), meditates with spiritual gurus in India and has installed meditation rooms across every Salesforce office, and Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, is into long, silent, and ascetic Vipassana retreats where he eats like a bird and talks to no one.

Silicon Valley fixture Tim Ferriss’ thing is shamanic ceremonies and ayahuasca, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, is also touting the benefits of both meditation retreats and psychedelic ceremonies.

The tech bros, now infamously speaking against introspection, are quite paradoxically all aboard the hallucinogen train. A Google search for “psychedelic-assisted leadership training” returns over a million results.

Welcome to the consciousness revolution (corporate edition).

The infrastructure of the awakened CEO

The tech bros themselves saw their growing interest in borderline spiritual leadership training as a market gap, which birthed the Costa Rica -based 1heart. This eco-luxury retreat center has hosted over 500 business leaders who are giving raving testimonials, all accompanied by a picture of a C-suite person exuding love for the world.

Alumni include billionaires, World Economic Forum delegates, TED speakers, and NGO founders, with 70% of participants are first timers with ayahuasca, and 80% come via referral from other executives.

Testimonials include:

• “It fundamentally transformed how I related to others nearly overnight.”

• “I felt this oneness. I felt connected to everyone and everything. I felt a lot of love for all the people in my life.”

• “You don’t need to be that Goldman Sachs guy who just plays with ones and zeroes. You can be that and, at the same time, have a super expressive, artistic mind.”

Essentially, if you strip away the hallucinogens and shamanic chanting, these retreats touch on the very basic human needs of presence, human connection, and shedding the impossibly heavy armor of professional identity. The attendees are on the very top of the corporate food chain, and on paper, have all the influence and material security in the world to feel fulfilled.

Yet, they still felt the call of the jungle. Why is that?

We’re transcending the ego, boys

Philosophers have over millennia written about a certain hollowness that seems to be inherent to human life, and different possible cures for it. In the light of these ideas, CEOs being obsessed with unlocking the next realm seems almost consequential.

The traditional view of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid, with self-actualization as the very last tier to check off.

However, Maslow himself was dissatisfied with his own creation, and before his passing, added another layer: self-transcendence.

I think this is what the tech bros are chasing at these ayahuasca retreats. They have self-actualized, every lower rung of the hierarchy has been crushed, checks on all boxes from safety to achievement. But it’s not enough, is it.

Transformative hospitality

Transformative hospitality, where people enter as one person and leave as another, is on the rise.

1. Soltara Healing Center, Costa Rica

This one is included in the enlightened-CEO starter pack. Ayahuasca, ocean air, and just enough infrastructure to make ego dissolution feel like a well-run program. You arrive as a founder, you leave texting your team about “heart-led leadership.”

2. Esalen Institute, Monterey, CA

The original California consciousness lab. Hot springs overlooking the Pacific, somatic workshops, and a lineage of people who have been trying to feel their feelings since the 1960s.

3. SHA Wellness Clinic, Mexico

Where biohacking meets linen robes. Blood panels, macrobiotic cuisine, and bowing down to the gods of optimization. In addition to the Riviera Maya property, the longevity galore is also available in Spain. The staff includes an impressive number of doctors and other specialists to give you the best detox of your life.

4. The Ranch, Malibu, CA

You hike, you sweat, you don’t eat very much, and somewhere around day four it starts feeling like clarity. Obviously the property has an infrared sauna, a regenerative garden, a cold plunge, a body composition analysis device, something called a ‘massage village’, and a ginormous gym.

5. Amanpuri, Thailand

Not explicitly “transformational,” but there is space and service so precise it can reorganize your entire nervous system. One of their signature holistic wellness journeys is called ‘Amanpuri Awakening’, which is so enlightened CEO core.

6. Six Senses Douro Valley, Portugal

Wine country meets wellness narrative (red wine is good for your heart I hear…). Forest bathing, spa rituals, etc. for hardcore dnd. The property’s vegetables are home grown and there’s even a pickle workshop.

7. Sensei Lanai, A Four Seasons Resort, Lanai, Hawaii

Larry Ellison’s version of inner peace with data-driven wellness. You stretch, you sip something herbal, you can do aerial yoga and guided garden walks… probably at some point your body is tricked into behaving differently.

8. Azuma Farm Koiwai, Japan

A slow-living cosplay property in rural Japan, by non other than Adrian Zecha, the founder of Aman. Guests are invtited to step into what could even be described as an ascetic rhythm of land, craft, and stillness, where the primary activity is simply being (but obviously expensively). It also happens to be brand spanking new, officially open in April 2026.

A higher realm of hospitality?

It is rare to find a (luxury) property nowadays without some sort of wellness offering. In fact, it would be an almost outrageous thought for a property to not adress well-being in some sort of way.

But looking at these signals (the enlightened CEOs, the democratization of biohacking and longevity practices with the proliferation of wearable tech and the mainstreamification of health optimization), hospitality is reponisitioning itself towards this demand by offering transformation as opposed to just experience to meet the evolving demands.

And it is, indeed, a repositioning and not a reinvention, as great hotels already are places where strangers attend to you with care and where you are temporarily freed from the machinery of your own life.

🔑 With shamanic greetings,

Emma and Michaela

Find original newsletter here

Burnett outlines four pillars of a life worth living: Wonder, Coherence, Community, and Flow. What struck me was how cleanly these map onto my approach in building brands (Essence → Structure → Expression), and how both frameworks invert Maslow’s hierarchy in the same way. Maslow placed self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, the peak you reach only after the lower rungs are secured. Safety and belonging first; meaning as reward. Burnett is suggesting that Wonder, which is the closest thing to self-actualization in his model, isn’t the destination but the starting orientation. Similarly, in my brand building process, “essence” is the starting point and gateway for all other elements of a brand.

Most brands are built from the bottom of the pyramid up. Safety first: secure the revenue, establish the category, prove the market. Then belonging: build community, find the audience. Then esteem: earn the reputation, collect the proof points. Meaning arrives last, if at all, usually in the form of a mission statement written by junior marketing team after the fact. The result is a brand that functions but doesn’t resonate. It has structure without soul, and the dissonance is LOUD.

What Burnett is describing, and what I keep coming back to in my own work, is that the most enduring lives and the most enduring brands begin with Coherence. This is where brand strategy and life design converge. Both require you to identify your core material, the essential stuff you're actually made of, before you decide how to express it outward. Both collapse when expression runs ahead of essence. And both are, at their best, an ongoing act of designing and editing (wayfinding, requiring real-time input and feedback).

The question I keep returning to is not “what do I want my life to look like” or “what do I want my brand to stand for,” because both of those questions assume you can see the destination clearly enough to reverse-engineer a path. Most of us can’t, and the ones who claim they can are usually editing the memory of how they got somewhere after they’ve already arrived.

The more useful question, and the one I point toward: what is already coherent in me, and how do I build the structure around it that lets that coherence hold over time? What’s the truth? And how does that get to come to life?

As many of you will remember, we recently decided to relocate our family from Aspen (where we spent the last 15 yearsish), to the Hudson Valley. Did we have a plan? Not really. But what we did have was a deep desire to build a life that better reflected our inner worlds.

I am creative to my core, and while my Aspen community is amazing (I love you!!!), I had started to feel the particular loneliness of speaking a language fluently that no one around me was quite understanding. Design objects are sacred, narrative and experience patterns are the air I breathe and the thoughtful energy behind a brand holds spiritual, life-affirming meaning. These things are not decorative concerns to me, they are how I understand the world. And so our move was an act of coherence. We deliberately changed the structure (chosen environment) of our life, to better express our true essence. Did it work? So far so good!

Most people, when something feels off, go straight for Expression. They redecorate, they rebrand, start a new project, or cut their bangs. It feels like action, and it is, but it’s action aimed at the wrong layer. Expression is the outermost ring (what people see), and because it’s visible, it’s also where we tend to perform our way through misalignment rather than actually resolve it.

But Expression is downstream of everything else. If it feels hollow, effortful, or like you’re constantly pushing something uphill, the problem almost certainly isn’t there. It’s most likely in your Structure, the conditions you’ve built or accepted around your life, or it traces all the way back to an Essence you haven’t been fully honest about yet (the choices that belong to someone else’s version of success; the income stream that pays well but costs you something more tender; the town, the house, the social circle that made sense at one point and is now feels off).

Which is why the framework moves in a specific direction and resists being reversed. Essence first, always. Not because it’s a philosophical nicety but because everything else is load-bearing on it. Structure is how you build conditions that allow your Essence to actually function in the world, and Expression is what naturally emerges when those two are in conversation with each other.

The three layers, in full:

Essence is your reason for being, your purest truth stripped of inherited expectations and performed identity. It’s what you were drawn to before anyone told you what was practical. It’s the themes that recur across every chapter of your life and it’s what you would do if outcome were irrelevant. Most people have a felt sense of their Essence but have never given themselves permission to build around it structurally.

Structure is the architecture you construct around that Essence, the conditions that either support your truth or contradict it. Where you live and the quality of light in your home. The rhythms of your day and how you protect your best creative energy. How you earn money and whether that process restores or depletes you. Your physical practices, your agreements about time. Structure is where most misalignment actually lives, and it’s also where the most meaningful change happens, because changing your structure changes what’s possible for you without requiring you to become a different person.

Expression is everything that radiates outward when Essence and Structure are in honest relationship with each other. Your style and the objects you choose to live with. Your business and the work you send into the world. Your social circle and the quality of conversation you’re regularly inside. Your creative output in any form. When Expression is working, it feels like more like true translation.

If this resonated and you want to go deeper, whether for your brand or for yourself, I built a 40+ page workbook around exactly this framework. It moves through Essence, Structure, and Expression in sequence to help you build a brand, or a life, with meaning and coherence.

FULL BRAND BUILDING PDF

And if you want to work through it together, that's what I'm here for.

Work With Me

One of my strengths (I’m discovering) is an operating system of sorts: seeding invitations. Invitations are those magical, universe moments where something could expand into an opportunity.

Invitations are everywhere. You simply have to train your mind to see them. While most people are scanning for risk, I am scanning for openings. A conversation that could become a collaboration, a dinner that could evolve into a gathering, an idea that, with just enough attention, could begin to take form as a project.

I’m living life in creation mode. Some examples of seeding your own opportunities:

• Host a gathering, ask your guests to bring someone you haven’t met yet

• Send a message to someone whose work you admire, ask them for a coffee

• Share a project that’s not fully baked, it could still even be an idea, to invite curiosity and participation

An invitation, at its core, requires very little. There is usually an underlying assumption that allows it to exist, along with a willingness to move before every variable has been resolved, and a certain tolerance for uncertainty that accompanies that movement.

I tend to operate with the belief that people are, in fact, interested in participating, contributing, and engaging more deeply than they often allow themselves to. What appears as hesitation is frequently a lack of initiation rather than a lack of desire.

At the same time, there are very few people who consider that the structure itself is not fixed, and that it is entirely possible to design the conditions of engagement rather than simply respond to them.

—

People want movement. They want meaning. They want shared authorship. They want to feel chosen for something that stretches them. When you extend an invitation, you offer all of that in a single gesture.

Game theory offers a useful language for understanding this dynamic.

In a positive-sum system, cooperation increases the total value available to all participants, expanding the field rather than dividing it. The benefits accrue not through competition alone, but through shared contribution, where trust and reciprocity begin to compound over time.

Creative ecosystems tend to function in a similar way.

When cooperation is assumed, behavior shifts accordingly. Ideas are shared earlier in their development, introductions are made with less hesitation, and proposals emerge before they are fully resolved. Others are given space to contribute, adding texture and dimension to the work in ways that would not be possible in isolation.

The edges of the process remain open for longer. An invitation offers not just access, but movement. It creates a sense of meaning by placing someone within a larger context, and it distributes authorship in a way that allows the work to extend beyond a single point of origin. There is an implicit signal within it, a recognition that participation is both possible and desired.

And in response to that signal, people tend to show up differently. There is often a greater level of engagement, a willingness to contribute, and a sense that the outcome is something being shaped collectively rather than delivered fully formed.

Not every invitation results in something tangible.

Some dissipate before they take hold, while others arrive at a moment that does not align. Timing, context, and readiness all play a role in whether something develops or remains latent.

Over time, however, a network of projects, relationships, and ideas takes shape, compounding through a series of small initiations that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Many of the outcomes that feel most meaningful are not the result of fully formed plans, but of moments where something was opened rather than defined.

I’ve begun to notice that much of my work operates this way, as a series of invitations extended into different directions, each one carrying the potential to become something more.

And the practice, increasingly, feels less about controlling the outcome, and more about recognizing where something is ready to begin, and choosing to open it.

10 Invitations to Seed Today

1. Invite someone into a conversation you’ve been having privately
   A thought, a question, a direction you’ve been circling on your own. Extend it outward and see what it becomes in dialogue. Send a DM to someone you admire on socials and open up a dialogue. Get curious about their POV.

2. Host something small with intention
   A dinner, a walk, a working session with fewer people and more presence. Let the container do the work. The point is togetherness. Encourage your guests to bring someone you have yet to meet.

3. Make an introduction
   Two people who don’t yet know they should know each other. Offer just enough context to spark movement. This is a gift and the karmic energy will thank you later.

4. Propose a loose collaboration
   Cold call/email a dream collaborator, and shoot your shot. This doesn’t need to be fully formed ideas… just a shared direction with room for the other person to shape it with you.

5. Turn a recurring idea into a visible project
   Something you’ve referenced more than once: give it a name, a container, and a moment to exist publicly.

6. Invite your audience into process, not just outcome
   Share what you’re thinking about while it’s still forming. Let people witness the shape of it.

7. Create a reason for people to gather around you
   A theme, a topic, a shared curiosity. Something that pulls people into proximity without over-explaining why.

8. Say “yes”
   To a conversation, an event, a person, a setting you wouldn’t normally choose. See what opens. If you want to explore this one further, I recommend reading The Surrender Experiment

9. Name something before it feels finished
   A concept, a direction, a body of work. Language has a way of pulling things into form. When people ask about what you do, try giving the fully-unformed indentity center stage.

10. Design a moment someone else can step into
    An experience, an idea, a space, a thread. Something that allows participation, not just observation. Start a Creative Club, and invite your community to round-table work sessions where each person gets to share what they’re working on for feedback and pressure testing

On Repeat:

Five Worth Finding

1. FRAMA T-Lamp

2. Glass Coffee Table

3. Lady of the Velvet Clock

4. Brushstroke Pearl Brooch

5. Sculptural Element Altar

I tend to think about brand building through three interrelated lenses: essence, structure, and expression. Three pillars of internal architecture that organize how a brand understands itself, how it moves through the world, and how it is ultimately perceived.

In my last newsletter I outline these pillars in depth with project-based examples:

The summary being,

Essence is what the brand understands about itself, the underlying coherence that informs its decisions, its tone, its sense of direction, and this is often where the work feels most resolved because it can be articulated with precision.

Structure is where that coherence becomes usable. It organizes the internal and external architecture of the brand, ensuring the organization is set up to express and deliver on its essence, not just in intention, but in practice.

Expression is where that rhythm becomes visible and tangible, where it takes form through language, environment, behavior, and design, and where the brand begins to register as something consistent without needing to explain itself.

What I have observed is that many brands invest deeply in the first, some extend into the second, and fewer fully carry the work into the third in a way that feels both coherent and inevitable.

Classifieds

Unique Investment Opportunities in my world

• Historic Boutique Hotel in the Hudson Valley

• Luxury Resort Ecosystem in Minas Gerais, Brazil

• Private Performance + Longevity Center on the Upper East Side

Inquire here.

Expressing your brand

Expression is where the work becomes perceptible and it does not live in a single place: it moves across imagery, language, product, packaging, digital surfaces, physical space, gatherings, collaborations, and the subtle ways a brand shows up in the world. Each element carries a fragment of the whole, and each becomes a point of contact through which the brand is felt.

Brand expression is where your brand becomes encountered. This is often where the work appears most creative, and at times most expansive, because it invites interpretation, experimentation, and range.

And it is also here that the earlier work is either reinforced or diluted. Because expression is not separate from essence or structure, it is dependent on them, shaped by them, and in turn, revealing whether they have been carried through with enough clarity and care.

When it is aligned, the brand extends beyond any single moment or interaction, and begins to exist as something continuous, something that can be entered, moved through, and returned to, each time offering a slightly different encounter while holding the same underlying logic.

If you’re interesting in diving deeper, I have just launched a comprehensive , 40-page, brand building workbook utilizing the 3 pillars (Essence, Structure, and Expression), to support founders and business builders if:

1. You are ready to intimately define your business, its position, and its magic

2. You understand your brand intuitively but struggle to communicate it, align your team around it, or express it consistently

3. You’ve never formally mapped your brand foundation and you’re starting to feel the cost of that

4. You’re deep in operations, reacting instead of building, and ready to shift

5. You’ve been in business for a while and something feels misaligned

FULL BRAND BUILDING PDF

FULL BRAND BUILDING PDF

Across my brand strategy work, and within very different contexts and scales,

1. a resort development in Brazil,

2. a longevity-focused membership model in New York, and

3. a real estate–meets–personal brand launching in Aspen

the same underlying pattern has surfaced: three layers organize the whole. Essence. Structure. Expression.

Essence is crucial, and often an overlooked part of brand-building. Essence is NOT logos or typefaces… Essence asks: What this is, where it sits, what it draws from, what it holds. What is the soul?

In Minas Gerais, Brazil, a 200-hectare resort ecosystem is coming to life, but the project begins long before any plan is drawn. The landscape is shaped by mineral wealth, baroque architecture, and a culture shaped by time, locality, and continuity. The question becomes less about what to build and more about tuning into what is already present.

The property’s scale is expansive and the hospitality concept unfolds through multiple environments: a luxury waterpark, branded residences, a boutique hotel, nature-based adventure, a safari experience, a spa.

There’s a lot to “sell.” With a project so massive (literal world-building), it could easily fragment. But how can we ensure all of this infrastructure feels embedded rather than placed? Not as features, but as expressions of something already there. The brand strategy work is to ensure the infrastructure feels embedded rather than placed.

As that orientation sharpens, the project begins to take shape from within. Decisions follow the logic of the place rather than the expectations of the market. The soul begins to clarify through the land and its generosity, the fourth-generation family that stewards the property, and the rich craft-based culture.

When brands are aligned with their essence, they carry an internal coherence. And the property (product) becomes inevitable.

Structure is where your coherence becomes usable. You begin to design a way in, a way through, and a way to return. I call these “invitations.” How are you attracting and inviting your audience in? How are you delivering value? Here you establish your brand promise and you better be ready to deliver.

In New York on the Upper East Side, I’ve been working with a membership-based longevity center. The premise is compelling and the concept is certainly in the Zeitgeist: health, performance, recovery, long-term optimization. A comprehensive, whole-body approach with state of the art resources and practitioners on your team.

But my starting point with the brand was an overwhelmed menu of possibility rather than a designed experience. The work here has been about building logic into the system. Defining what each membership actually offers. How someone moves through it, and how they feel during that journey. What is included, what is layered, what unfolds over time. What’s the transformation being offered when I purchase this product? My focus has been on creating a structure that reflects the depth of the offering without overwhelming the person entering it.

There’s a particular satisfaction in this phase as things shift from

reactive → intentional and a collection of ideas → a monetization engine

You can deliver on your brand promise and growth begins there.

Expression = brand touchpoints. Expression is where the work becomes perceptible. What's your brand saying? And what's the delivery method?

In Aspen, I recently worked on the launch of a real estate brand. The foundation was already strong and established: deep relationships, an intuitive understanding of the market, a distinct way of moving through the world. The founder understood her brand’s essence, and the structure was in place. But how was anyone else going to know?

The answer lives in many places and this can often be the creative, fun, playful layer of the brand: the imagery, language, the way a product is presented or packaged, social media campaigns, a creative gathering bringing together like-minded people, or activations with aligned partners. This is where “thinking outside the box” thrives.

At MOLLIE, a design-forward boutique hotel - the first of it’s kind in Aspen - this lived in the property hiring a Dreamweaver. Someone to translate the brand into every touchpoint the guest would experience. The Dreamweaver worked collaboratively across every department to extend the identity of the hotel beyond its physical form. The brand became something that could be entered into repeatedly, from different angles, fully understood and lived by its participants. (If you don’t know me, I had the honor of being MOLLIE’s Dreamweaver for about 18 months during their first year+ open, shaping the role and guests’ experience of the property).

Nothing exists in isolation, every detail contributes to the overall perception. Over time, these expressions accumulate. They alchemize something recognizable into a presence that extends beyond any single moment: a BRAND.

These layers are not sequential, they move together. As essence magnetizes, structure grounds. As structure stabilizes, expression becomes more precise. As expression evolves, it reveals new dimensions of the essence.

The work becomes iterative, less about arriving, and more about refining your living organism of a brand. Projects that carry this level of attention feel cohesive and considered; something you can step into and understand without needing it explained. There’s a clarity to what they are, a logic to how they move, with a presence to how they are experienced.

If you’re building something and it hasn’t quite settled yet, it’s often a matter of locating which layer is asking for attention.

Yet here’s my prediction for the world-wide-web: the most interesting corners of the internet are getting smaller.

The number of people online continues to grow, but across media, software, and culture, influence is consolidating around smaller, trusted circles.

Curators. Tastemakers. Private networks. Insider communities.

The era of mass influence is giving way to something else: Intimate influence.

1. From Infinite Feeds to Trusted Filters

The early promise of the internet was abundance: Infinite information, infinite creators, infinite choice. The modern internet contains more information than any human could reasonably process in a lifetime. This abundance creates a peculiar side effect. When everything becomes available, attention becomes fragile. People increasingly seek guides who can filter the noise and surface the signal. How exhausted are we now? The reality is overwhelming.

A typical user today navigates:

• dozens of social platforms
• thousands of content creators
• algorithmically generated feeds
• an endless stream of products, ideas, and opinions

…resulting in cognitive exhaustion. When everything is available, the most valuable resource becomes someone who can filter it well (this is why the curator has become one of the most powerful roles on the modern internet).

Across culture we see a shift from: Algorithm → Curator

People increasingly trust:

• niche newsletters
• private recommendation networks
• tastemakers with specific expertise
• community-driven lists and recs

Instead of searching the entire internet, people increasingly prefer following someone whose taste they trust. In other words, the internet is rediscovering the value of editorship. One of the clearest examples of this dynamic lives on Substack, where writers such as Nadine Choe (The Stanza), Joel Uili (The Career Archetypes), and Lottie Bisou (The Art Director: Directional) have built influential audiences through consistent editorial perspective. Readers subscribe not only for information but for interpretation. Each writer acts as a human filter who translates complex ecosystems into clear signals.

Visual culture offers its own version of this phenomenon through Are.na. Designers, artists, and researchers build curated channels of references that function like public notebooks. Following someone’s Are.na channel offers a glimpse into the intellectual landscape behind their work.

Film culture provides another illustration through Letterboxd, where lists created by critics, directors, and friends have become trusted maps through the overwhelming archive of cinema.

Across these platforms the same pattern appears. People gravitate toward consistent taste.

2. The Return of the Insider

Digital culture once revolved around broadcasting. A creator produced content > an audience consumed it.

Many of the most vibrant digital communities now feel more like insider networks. These spaces revolve around belonging, shared context, and cultural fluency. As digital culture organizes itself around smaller circles of trust, physical space is following the same pattern. Across cities, people are gravitating toward environments that mirror these intimate networks. Shared workspaces, creative salons, micro-conferences, and curated coworking clubs create the same sense of proximity that small online communities offer. The the social club (Soho House, Neue House, etc.) boom has demonstrated how powerful these environments can be when people gather around shared curiosity and ambition, around a connected culture. The energy inside these rooms feels different from traditional networking events. Conversations stretch longer, ideas move faster, and collaboration happens almost accidentally.

The invitation platform Partiful has become ubiquitous in creative circles. Invitations circulate among friends and collaborators, often carrying the feeling of being welcomed into a particular cultural moment. The community platform Geneva (recently acquired by Bumble) has gained traction by helping creators organize structured groups with events, discussions, and private channels.

Meanwhile, countless communities gather inside Discord servers dedicated to topics ranging from indie game development to niche fashion archives. These servers function as living salons where conversations unfold continuously among people who share the same intellectual terrain.

Inside these networks, influence flows through credibility and proximity. Members participate because they trust the collective intelligence of the group.

The internet begins to resemble a constellation of small rooms filled with people who actually want to talk to each other.

3. The Recommendation Economy

Abundance creates another interesting cultural behavior. People increasingly rely on recommendations. A friend recommends a book. A curator suggests a new brand. A trusted voice shares a travel destination.

These recommendations carry weight because they arrive with context and platforms devoted to curated discovery are flourishing as a result.

The consumer product review platform RecLeague has launched for individuals to build their own. curated collections of recommendations crossing categories and mediums. Creative Director, Ali LaBelle, has built out an entire Department Store of recommendations.

[Personal note: I quite literally vibe-coded a small app called Curo built around this exact idea of curated recommendations within trusted circles. Before I could even publish it, a friend texted me a link to RecLeague, which operates on nearly the same premise. A reminder that the collective consciousness tends to arrive at the same ideas at roughly the same time.]

Fashion discovery operates through similar networks. LTK enables creators to share highly specific product recommendations with audiences who follow them for their taste and styling instincts.

Within publishing ecosystems themselves, recommendation cultures thrive inside comment sections and subscriber chats. Substack writers often cultivate small recommendation loops where readers exchange books, articles, and discoveries within a trusted circle.

Participation remains small enough that individual taste matters. One thoughtful recommendation from a respected voice carries remarkable influence. A friend texting “you have to read this” still outranks most algorithms.

4. The Coming Explosion of Vibe-Coded Apps

A technological shift will accelerate this movement toward intimate networks. Artificial intelligence has dramatically lowered the barrier to building software. Tools that once required experienced engineering teams now allow individuals to create working applications through conversational prompts and rapid iteration. Developers call this process as vibe coding.

Platforms such as Replit or Base44 allow creators to generate and deploy applications directly from the browser. Development environments like Cursor assist programmers by writing large portions of code through natural language instructions. Meanwhile tools like Lovable help founders prototype entire applications within hours.

These tools point toward a future with an extraordinary number of new applications entering the market. Yet most of these apps will not pursue global scale: creators will increasingly build tools for the communities they already belong to. A writer may design a custom platform for their readers. A collector community might create software to catalog and trade objects. A learning group may build an application tailored to their curriculum. Software begins to function as community infrastructure.

The internet may soon contain millions of small apps serving hundreds of people each. The next generation of digital tools could resemble neighborhood cafés rather than stadiums.

5. Smaller Platforms, Stronger Culture

When platforms shrink in scale, culture becomes sharper, language develops, nuance emerges, and shared references accumulate.

Large platforms often flatten identity because everyone participates in the same environment. Smaller communities cultivate distinctive cultures that evolve organically.

The design ecosystem surrounding Figma illustrates this beautifully. Designers share experiments, files, and frameworks within a culture shaped by shared visual language.

Entrepreneurial communities such as NFX Guild bring together founders who operate within a common set of frameworks and ambitions. Members benefit from collective insight that grows deeper over time.

Fashion culture offers another compelling example through Grailed, where collectors discuss archive pieces and emerging designers with remarkable fluency. The platform feels less like a generic marketplace and more like a global enthusiast club.

These communities function as micro cultures. Within them, taste evolves collectively. Participation becomes meaningful because members recognize one another’s references and influences. Culture grows stronger when it has enough space to develop its own dialect.

6. The Curator Becomes Infrastructure

All of these shifts highlight the growing importance of curators. In the early internet, platforms organized information. Social media later elevated creators who could capture attention at scale. The emerging ecosystem places new value on individuals who can interpret, connect, and refine.

Curators transform overwhelming information into meaningful pathways. Fashion editors surface emerging designers before the mainstream catches on. Cultural writers translate technological shifts into narratives that people can understand. Researchers assemble knowledge landscapes through thoughtful references and commentary.

Their work resembles infrastructure because it shapes how others navigate the world. People return to these voices because their taste remains consistent. Trust compounds through repeated acts of thoughtful selection.

The curator has become one of the most powerful roles on the modern internet.

Which may explain why so many of the best conversations online now resemble beautifully organized dinner parties. Someone interesting brings a few brilliant people together, pours a drink, and says, “You should meet.”

A final note: Intimate influence will not be confined to the edges of the internet for long — it naturally seeks a table, a room, and a group of people willing to continue the conversation. It will bloom into life and reshape cultural reality as we currently engage with it.

And a note on the power of the wish list which I’ve enlisted heavily this season: If you find something you love, add it. Let desire have a place to land. Then revisit it, but if you cannot remember what was on your list last month, delete it. Attention is a form of devotion - what lingers earns its place.

Five Worth Finding

Grand Collar This lemon topaz whispers promise of the sweet summer sun

Gondola Tote Very intro green as we look to welcome the spring chickens

Everything Shirt Crisp and classic

La Boxer Shorts A contemporary twist in a divine satin silk

Dog Waste Bag Holder Melting snow means longer walks with the pooch but make it stylish

The Slipper Shoe

A small contextual note on the slipper shoes in this edit: the current obsession traces back to The Row’s Stella slipper, which has become a viral staple among stylists and fashion-forward dressers. Insider-viral.

[The Row Stella Slipper *the shoe that sparked it all, Figarine]:

Finding the right one is harder than it looks if you are not splurging on the original. It cannot read ballet flat. It cannot collapse into house slipper. The line must be elongated and spare — the toe soft but intentional — the sole slim but structured enough to carry you through a full day.

• It nods to Japanese minimalism.

• It carries the discipline of a tabi-inspired silhouette.

• It feels informed by house shoes rather than dancewear.

Not a flat, not a slipper. The slipper shoe lives in that narrow margin of restraint. Minimal. Elegant. Slightly elusive. The best versions feel almost anonymous on the foot, which is precisely the point. Happy springing

01 Everyday Flat | 02 Luna Slipper | 03 Fathom Flat

04 Apres Ski Shearling Slipper Shoe | 05 Aeropi Ballet Flat

06 Mesh Flat | 07 Burgundy Flats | 08 Leni Flat

Big Bootie Leather Slip On *Mens

I have to harness it, nurture it, feed it, let it sleep. I have to notice when it’s restless and when it’s exhausted. Sometimes it arrives as a starburst of life force, ripping through me with a velocity that feels almost supernatural. I outrun my own expectations, making things faster than I can process them. I feel lit from within.

And then there is the come down. The crash after the storm of output. And bewilderment of realizing something immense moved through me and is suddenly gone. The body feels emptied. The mind slows. I am left recovering in a sense.

Inputs and outputs.

I must let my nervous system remember steadiness. I rest, return to a rhythm that provides my mind and body with balance, and begin the cycle anew. I fill the well again, slowly, without demanding performance from it. Mostly, I clean, listen to music, drink tea, watch tv and go to coffee shops.

And then… I wait. I wait for it to strike again and I swear to myself I’ll be ready to grab it by the horns when it arrives. But what in between? My work must go on, life keeps moving… there is no calling out of work because I am not feeling creative today. So I tease creativity out in small, ordinary moments. I look outward and find beauty in the material world. I gather fragments. I remember source. Place myself into a mode of discovery.

Because creativity is not only the blaze, but it is also the tending. The steady devotion to noticing and a willingness to sit in the lull without panicking and trusting that the cycle will turn again. It always does.

What’s stirring me lately, plus a playlist for cultivating that creative flo.

MC

Loved This incredible ring setting is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Suspended with dangling beads from experimental jeweler Claire Zukowski. I couldn’t find the gold available but here is its silver counterpart boasting a princess cut citrine.

Wearing I am a neutrals girl if there ever was one. But this Valentine’s Day, as I was headed out the door, my mom topped off my outfit with these simple but wildly effective (see image, the perfect pop) red Prada pumps. Seriously considering adding a pair to my wardrobe. Every wardrobe would actually benefit from a pair in each color, budget allowing.

Listening to Throw back! The XX was on a radio station I was recently listening to and dang! did it transport me back. When The XX was a big deal I was in high school and headed for design school, creating and shaping my identity in the big bad world. Here I am at another threshold of identity, living in a new place, and this album hits. I highly recommend for creative, flow work.

Reading Heart Lamp, winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize - short, expressive, anecdotal stories capturing the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. This caught my eye on the shelf as I caught myself READING an excerpt from 10 feet away - the brilliant cover design pulled me in.

Inspired by Shaker Hooks - Shaker design is a 19th-century, faith-based aesthetic defined by extreme minimalism, utility, and exceptional craftsmanship. It focuses on, "Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful." I love the modular design and have been inspired by my recent Pinterest rabbit hole. We’re adding them to create additional utility in our upstate NY home (Shakers originated in Colonial NY). Placemaking. If you want to play around with the concept, here’s an IKEA product that could be installed and easily painted any color that moves you. I think they look best across an entire wall (as shown below).

Lusting after I am almost nervous to blow the lid on this discovery but I love little more than sharing my discoveries with others. BDDW, founded by PA based artist Tyler Hays, is a leading furniture and hardware manufacturer in collectable, American, folk-design. His pieces are highly sought after, and almost everyone who loves the craft and furniture world is familiar with his unique work. I recently discovered that they host weekly(!!!) auctions for their studio experiments. Everything from their famous puzzle paintings, to candle sticks, ceramic buttons, and other functional pottery, to furniture. I’ll leave it there, happy hunting.

Creative Flow Playlist

get the juices flowing

Plus+1

I often find the most inspiration in others. The world is filled with so many damn creative people - it’s so freakin cool!

Plus+1 is a concept borrowed, re-packaged as it were, but the premise is that we gather creative humans for the sake of it, and the requirement for entry is that you bring along someone that inspires you. In this way, we grow our connections to people that are endorsed as being interesting and contributory. Sometimes these gatherings are gentle and informal, and others have been formatted around Creative Conversations/participatory dialogue.

Since my move to NY I am definitively in the market for more community, and have a few Plus+1 Gatherings in the works with some cool people and venues I’ve connected with since being here.

Stay in the know about upcoming NY events by Joining the WhatsApp group here.

OR Join the Aspen Chapter, led by my good friend Whitney McLaughlin, here.

Aspen Women’s Investment Club

If you’re in Aspen this week join Sara Faurer with Ellevest for a Women’s Investment Club gathering at the lovely Explorer Booksellers. RSVP to sfaurer@ellevest.com