A Blue Alternative to a Trump Hotel

Not long ago, Katherine Lo, the founder of Eaton Workshop, a hotel, social club and co-working space scheduled to open on K Street in Washington, D.C., in August, gathered six employees on the sun-drenched deck of her bungalow in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Green juices were ordered. Laptops were opened. An agenda was distributed. Everybody wore sunglasses. At least one person clutched a vape pen.

“Has the feng shui master replied about the name of the restaurant?” Lo asked.

“Not yet,” came the reply.

Concerns abounded. An art installation commissioned for the lobby involved vintage-looking TV screens broadcasting presidential election footage from various time periods, including the present. “If the loop is too short, it will drive us crazy,” said Sheldon Scott, the hotel’s culture director.

“This rooftop garden that we’re putting on top of the hotel?” Lo said. “I’m slightly concerned because it’s in this area that no one will be able to see.”

You’ve heard of Soho House — well, perhaps this will be Boho House (or Bobo House?). Eaton is a hospitality company that leans firmly, and unapologetically, to the left; Lo, 36, hopes the D.C. location will be a gathering place for liberals who feel displaced by President Donald Trump, and that it could even serve as a retort of sorts to his own hotel, half a mile away.

Along with 209 guest rooms (the starting rate is $199 a night), she has planned a movie theater (for independent films), a wellness center (offering reiki and acupuncture) and a co-working club accommodating 370 (“word-of-mouth and all aligned people,” Lo said).

The bathrooms will be gender neutral. The Piscataway tribe of Native Americans indigenous to the area will be recognized. “We were going to put up a plaque to signify that we’re on stolen land,” Scott said. “But now we’re talking about contemporary programming possibilities and the prospect of them blessing the space.”

An Eaton in Kowloon, Hong Kong, has already opened; others are planned for San Francisco and Seattle. A few hundred million dollars have been funneled into the fledgling chain, Lo said, by Great Eagle, the Hong Kong real estate holding firm that owns it, which her grandfather founded in 1963. Great Eagle is also behind Langham, the upscale line of hotels overseen by Lo’s father, Ka Shui Lo.

While the marble corridors of Langham properties cater overtly to the 1 percent, Lo, his daughter, hopes to attract a more diverse breed of business travelers, thought leaders, musicians and artists.

Chip Conley, the founder of the boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre and an Airbnb strategic adviser Lo consulted, sees an untapped market. “In ice cream it was Ben & Jerry’s, in clothing it was Patagonia, in grocery stores it was Whole Foods,” Conley said. “When it comes to a global brand of hotels, I think there’s a huge opportunity.”

What if an alt-right group wanted to gather at Eaton?

“I’m using Airbnb canceling Nazi accounts as a precedent, as companies go toward this new world,” said Lo, referring to the short-term rental service canceling the accounts of white supremacists after the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. “We want Eaton to be a thoughtful place of dialogue and diverse views coming together, but there are obviously places where we draw the line.”

Lo has long considered herself an activist. In 2000, while attending Yale, she served as a student delegate for Greenpeace at the Kyoto Protocol climate talks at The Hague. During college, she also hung an upside-down U.S. flag from her bedroom window to protest the war in Iraq.

She helped put together protests against the World Trade Organization in her native Hong Kong, corralling Chinese farmers and videotaping marches. She also got a master’s degree in film from the University of Southern California and has directed music videos. “I struggled for many years with how to reconcile my privilege, my duty to my family business and my dreams,” she said.

Her creative direction of the Langham Chicago, which opened in 2013 in a skyscraper built by Mies van der Rohe, won praise, but burnishing that brand felt insufficient as a calling. “Luxury hotels are obviously beautiful,” Lo said, “but that’s not what I care about.”