14 Oct 2026 09:00
Frictionless by Design - Drew Stuart - Defining Hospitality
What if the best sign of great hospitality is that nothing ever gets in your way? Dan Ryan sits down for a live recording of Defining Hospitality, set in a podcast studio tucked inside a former 1930s sandwich shop at Rockefeller Center. The conversation moves from frictionless guest experiences to the habit of saying “we” instead of “I,” with stops along the way for world building, big stakeholder rooms, and the fears that grow as a business does. It’s candid, funny, and built on a friendship that came before any business did.
Drew Stewart is an architect, interior designer, and occasional developer, and a founding partner and director of construction and development at INC Architecture & Design. He has spent 20 years growing the New York studio into a powerhouse, earning a spot in the Interior Design Hall of Fame along the way. His work includes the TWA Hotel, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, and the Atlas Hotel at Harvard, and he is celebrating the milestone with a monograph, Us Is More, hitting shelves TODAY October 14th.
Chapters:
00:00 Why Hospitality Matters
00:35 Meet Drew Stewart
01:22 Recording at Rock Center
03:00 A Designer’s Eye for Detail
04:09 Defining Frictionless Hospitality
05:44 Managing Mega Projects
11:19 Tech That Aligns Stakeholders
14:52 Hall of Fame Moment
19:07 Us Is More and The Book
34:38 Spending Your Own Money
35:10 Fine Tuning Design Value
35:54 New Empathy For Developers
37:06 Entrepreneurship And Risk
38:04 Fear Grows With Success
39:08 TWA And World Building
41:06 Rockefeller Concourse Redesign
47:29 Building 1 Hotel With Barry
50:51 Book Future And Farewell
Quote of the Show:
“Having creative, thoughtful people across the table turns out to be the single most important thing about any project.” - Drew Stuart
Building a hotel, brand, or guest experience? Reach out to Dan on LinkedIn or hit reply on the Substack to share what you’re working on.
Links:
- Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@defininghospitality?sub_confirmation=1
- Substack: https://www.defininghospitality.live/
- Guest’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-stuart-22bb286/
- Guests Website: https://inc.nyc/
- Us is More Book: https://a.co/d/01ctnv2F
- Dan Ryan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedailydanryan/
🏨✨ Defining Hospitality is Sponsored by Berman Falk https://www.bermanfalk.com/ - Check out their impact page! 🌍🌱 https://www.bermanfalk.com/impact/
Ways to Tune In:
