People typically ask me how we built Urban Cowboy into a boutique brand. The truth is that there isn’t any real playbook or blueprint.
We joke that we were accidental hoteliers. We didn’t come from a major hotel company or inherit decades of operating experience. We started with a small bed and breakfast in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around the time it became a hipster enclave but well before it became an international destination. We weren’t trying to build a hotel brand: We solely wanted to build a place we wanted to exist—a place we wanted to invite our friends, travelers and the creative community to.
Looking back, that was our biggest advantage.
And Did It… Our Way
We didn’t have institutional backing. We didn’t have the budgets, departments or corporate infrastructure that larger hotel companies rely on. Every decision—creative, operational, experiential—came from us. While that made things harder, it also created an incredible amount of freedom to create in our mold.
When you’re small, you can adjust in real time. You don’t need committees to approve an idea or months to implement a change. If something doesn’t feel right, you fix it. If something resonates with guests, you double down. That nimbleness is a competitive advantage.
More importantly, you develop an obsession with details. Consider our original Brooklyn property: We meticulously burned palo santo in different rooms, experimenting with how scent changed throughout the space; we obsessed over lighting levels, music, textures, and the rhythm of a guest’s experience. Those aren’t things you can simply write into an operations manual: They’re learned through repetition and intention, then passed down person to person.
Hospitality has always been about creating a feeling, and feelings are built through thousands of seemingly minor moments.
Growing Up and Out
The Brooklyn property had a ripple effect, leading to expansion in Nashville, then the Catskills and finally Denver. We even expanded to our first standalone bar concept in downtown Nashville—Urban Cowboy Bar. All these properties home in on quintessential Americana nostalgia, blending rustic luxury, vintage and soulful design.
I am fascinated by the way hospitality brands have the freedom to design not just spaces but experiences. We didn’t want to only sell a room; we wanted to sell a lifestyle. Consider imagery: We photographed people soaking in vintage clawfoot tubs, lounging by fireplaces and embracing moments of solitude or connection. The imagery wasn’t aspirational because it looked expensive; it was aspirational because it looked authentic. One of the most valuable decisions we made was accepting that Urban Cowboy wouldn’t be for everyone.
Urban Cowboy started as a place friends and family would love and want to congregate in. It became part of a much larger cultural conversation—tapping into a zeitgeist of the twenty-tens. Americana was experiencing a resurgence—fashion, music and culture were embracing a romanticized version of the cowboy spirit. It felt like we had tapped into a cultural moment before fully realizing it ourselves.
We’ve worked hard to ensure Urban Cowboy never becomes a formula. I like to think of each property less as another hotel and more as its own art project. Every project begins with a “picking trip,” a gathering of objects and antiques that end up being statement pieces. I don’t want to recreate the same design over and over again because every destination deserves its own story.
Think of a property like a different album: There are familiar themes and recognizable elements since they are from the same artist, but each one has different collaborators, different inspiration and a different emotional tone. It’s a very personal way to approach design.
Happy Stumble
One of the biggest risks we ever took ended up becoming one of our defining signatures. At the Brooklyn location, there wasn’t enough space to build a separate guestroom bathroom. Instead, we placed a 100-year-old clawfoot tub directly inside the sleeping area. At the time, it felt unconventional, even risky. Today, that bathtub has become one of the most photographed elements of our brand and remains a brand design pillar of nearly every Urban Cowboy hotel. The lesson: Sometimes, your greatest differentiator comes from solving a practical problem creatively rather than following convention. They become happy mistakes
As opportunities have grown, we’ve learned that saying “no” is just as important as saying “yes.” There have been projects that would have accelerated our growth, but they weren’t places we would have genuinely wanted to spend time ourselves. Growth has never been the goal for its own sake.
The challenge is keeping the soul in the sauce.
My biggest piece of advice for fledgling brand builders might sound selfish but is essential: create something you wish existed and build for yourself. Independent hospitality will never have the biggest budgets, but it can have the strongest point of view. And in an industry where so many experiences begin to look and feel the same, authenticity is our greatest competitive advantage of all.
Story contributed by Lyon Porter, founder, Urban Cowboy and Cowboy Creative