Provenance Hotels has announced the hiring of Ashley Stemper as Director of Interior Design for its growing portfolio of hotels. Stemper brings diverse international expertise to the newly-created role in which she will be responsible for directing design projects for the company’s eight existing hotels in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Nashville and New Orleans and overseeing direction and execution for all new projects in the works. These include Hotel Theodore which is slated to open in downtown Seattle later this year, the adaptive reuse of the historic Woodlark and Cornelius buildings in Portland and a ground-up development on the sand in Hermosa Beach, California.
Stemper comes to Portland-based Provenance Hotels from Commune Hotels and Resorts in New York where she was design director overseeing the design and development of new build projects and renovations that included Joie de Vivre properties in New Orleans, New York, Miami, Baltimore and San Francisco as well as tommie in New York and Thompson properties in Nashville and Miami. In her new role at Provenance Hotels, Stemper will collaborate with design firms to implement and enhance the unique brand story the company develops for each new property. This includes directing the deeply-integrated art collections at each new hotel. In addition, she will also work closely with Provenance Hotels development team to acquire new properties and management contracts based on the strength of the company’s innovative approach to design and branding.
Prior to joining Commune, Stemper was based in Hong Kong at Gettys where she worked on luxury hotel properties like The Penninsula in Hong Kong, Tazi Palace in Tangier, Morroco and the Ritz Carlton in Doha, Qatar. A graduate of Drexel University in Philadelphia with a Masters in Interior Architecture, she started her career at Granary Associates (now Stantec) in that city then moved to Dubai to work with Design Design and create the Sisters Spa before being tapped by Design Worldwide Partnership to move to Hong Kong and work on on a variety of retail and food and beverage projects across Asia. She then worked at Hirsch Bedner Associates where she worked on hotel projects like the Shangri-La in Chongqung, China and Royal Plaza in Hong before joining Gettys.
