Barry Sternlicht made a fortune building Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which birthed successful brands like W Hotels, into a giant of the travel industry.
Now he wants to do it all again — under the Starwood name.
Mr. Sternlicht is resurrecting the Starwood Hotels brand starting in February, nine years after the previous company was sold to Marriott in a $13 billion deal that created the biggest hotel chain in the world. His current hotel company, SH Hotels & Resorts, will take on the Starwood name.
The move is a sign that Mr. Sternlicht, 64, wants to reassert himself as a force in hospitality 20 years after stepping down from Starwood. Since then, he has focused largely on Starwood Capital, the $115 billion private equity firm where he created Starwood Hotels.
Hotels have remained part of part of Starwood Capital’s business, with Mr. Sternlicht buying and selling them just as he has apartment buildings and other properties. But since 2015, he said, he has wanted to have another crack at making a mark on the hotel-management industry under the Starwood name.
“I’m kind of like a singer having one song,” he said in an interview. “I want to have two songs.”
Reviving the Starwood name may seem like a small change in the grand scheme of things; indeed, Marriott had retired it years ago. But beyond his attachment to the name, Mr. Sternlicht believed getting it back would raise the company’s profile and help with recruiting. He took back the brand last year.
It’s the latest step in Mr. Sternlicht’s campaign to build a new hotel empire. By the time Marriott acquired the Starwood of old, that company oversaw more than 1,300 properties in 100 countries, with brands including Westin, W, Sheraton and St. Regis. The newly reborn Starwood has three brands so far, with 14 hotels in five countries.
It will likely be benchmarked against what Mr. Sternlicht achieved the first time around.
A real estate investor by background, Mr. Sternlicht hadn’t worked in the hotel business specifically before 1994, when his Starwood Capital bought Westin from a Japanese corporation, and then began adding other chains. In 1998, Mr. Sternlicht created the W chain, whose glamorous lobbies and bars made it synonymous with sleek chic.
He pored over even tiny details — the number of pillows, how porters handled guest luggage — at existing chains like Westin and Sheraton. “I’m like the style police, so people don’t drift off,” he said.
And at Westin Hotels, he introduced what he called the Heavenly Bed, which quickly became a selling point for the chain. It was a gamble on upgrading travelers’ experience at the chain, though associates initially balked at the cost.
“To change every bed in Westins cost $17 million,” Mr. Sternlicht said. “It was the best $17 million we ever spent.”
The Heavenly Bed quickly became popular, leading to it being sold at Nordstroms — and to rivals rolling out their own fluffy snow-white mattress offerings.
“He was the one who really cemented the concept of lifestyle hotels,” said Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality consultant, calling Mr. Sternlicht one of the architects of the modern hotel business. “The industry needed an outsider to say, ‘What’s important to hotel guests?’”
Mr. Sternlicht stepped down as Starwood’s executive chairman in 2005, after years of often clashing with the company’s other top executives. A decade later, Marriott bought Starwood after a fierce bidding war with a Chinese insurance firm.
By that point, Mr. Sternlicht had gotten back into hotel operations, creating three new chains. One is the high-end Baccarat, whose Manhattan location features ornate crystal chandeliers by the French glassmaker from whom it licenses its brand. (Starwood Capital once owned that company, too.)
Another is 1 Hotels, an environmentally minded lifestyle brand, with wood, stone and green foliage adorning the lobbies. A third is Treehouse, which Mr. Sternlicht described as a playful brand with vintage stylings meant to remind travelers of childhood. And he said that he has been working on at least one more brand.
The new Starwood has plans to open 22 hotels in the pipeline through 2028, including 1 Hotels in Austin, Texas; on Crete and in Seattle; Treehouses in Manchester, England, and Miami; and Baccarats in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; the Maldives and Rome. All three brands are expected to open locations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well.
(Mr. Sternlicht added that while he had no intention of selling the hotel company, he had considered selling a small portion to raise money for further international expansion.)
But the hotel industry has become much more crowded since Mr. Sternlicht built the original Starwood. His innovations — in amenities and customer service, design, marketing and more — have been absorbed by competitors. Every major operator has a lifestyle brand, and scores of independent boutiques have opened.
For Mr. Sternlicht, though, the work itself is part of the motivation.
“This is my passion,” he said. “Designing hotels and keeping them on brand is fun.”
