Design is immensely important for hotels, both to get guests excited enough to purchase and to facilitate an incredible onsite experience. And yet, here we are in mid-2026 and the idea of ‘the great hotel blanding’ and ‘the beiging of hotels’ are both at the forefront. There’s a sea of sameness creeping into hospitality design projects, but we’re here to highlight one brand that resolutely kicks that trend in the head – Urban Cowboy.
But it’s more than just pioneering one-of-a-kind spaces. In speaking with founders Jersey Banks and Lyon Porter, Urban Cowboy is a labor of love and what makes it whole is that each property is never done. There are continuous improvements, enhancements and experimentation – an opposing philosophy versus flags where PIPs are scheduled and must follow brand standards or procurement guidelines.
Urban Cowboy is a hotel brand where guests can feel this obsessive love as the founders and their teams continuously craft and recraft an irreplaceable set and setting at each location. In Brooklyn, what started as Banks and Porter’s own townhouse evolved into a gathering place where travelers and locals naturally mingled over breakfast, cocktails and conversation. From there, the brand has been bootstrapped the whole way, now with three locations in the United States and more soon to be announced.
In Nashville (8 guest suites), the pioneering Americana theme was adapted to include a music parlor. Then the lodge in the Catskills (44 rooms) embraced the region’s Borscht Belt history with vintage bowling lanes where guests reset the pins by hand, riverside plunges after some time in an Estonian sauna, acres of protected wilderness that invite people to disconnect and communal fireplaces as a place where new friendships are formed. Finally came the Denver location (16 rooms and guest suites) which added a Gilded Age mansion.
At each property, every room is different; every building dictates its own story; none are ever truly finished. During our time together, both founders recalled how they’ve driven across America collecting antiques and found objects to incorporate into the design, and then adjusting layouts after watching how guests naturally move through a space and layering new experiences over time.
This same philosophy of loving perfectionism extends far beyond design. Urban Cowboy has deliberately eliminated televisions from guestrooms so that guests gravitate toward the aforementioned fireplaces, gardens and bars.
This may seem anathema for flagged hotels, but its these sorts of bold decisions that attract the right types of travelers – those who are looking to connect with a place and people rather than get the same experience as what they have at home. A ‘sense of community’ like this may seem like it’s only a mission statement, but as Banks and Porter remarked there are guests who have arrived as strangers but who left as business partners, lifelong friends and even spouses.
Calling this level of design as mere amenities doesn’t quite capture the magic that hotels are capable of when every element is humming on the same frequency to the point where these sorts of serendipitous connections can be made.
It’s also refreshing to hear founders who openly admit they still don’t have all the answers! Urban Cowboy has grown one property at a time, adapting historic buildings with all their quirks, learning from each renovation and treating every opening as another experiment. While it’s fun to wax poetic on the outcomes of their work, make no mistake that adapting older sites is as much as a labor as it is a love.
The lesson for all here is that the truest form of hospitality has always been built on love: love of design, love of hosting, love of craftsmanship and love of making people feel something. Somewhere along the way, many of us started hitting copy-paste around the world and so now we have the existential crises of this ‘blanding’ and ‘beiging’. If there ever was a brand that gives a shining light back to our roots and our core reason of being, it is Urban Cowboy.
