Answer extracted from the Beyond Luxury podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How do personal travel experience and cultural exposure shape an individual's ability to develop independent taste in hospitality and design?
Independent taste in design and hospitality emerges from direct, sustained exposure to diverse places, art history, and cultural refinement—privileges most people never access. Most people are wired to be told what is cool by media and industry influencers rather than developing their own evaluative frameworks through lived experience and reflection.
Nadine Choe's perspective on luxury and design is rooted in a specific educational foundation: living in different places around the world, traveling extensively, and studying Italian Renaissance art history and its principles of perspective, harmony, and color theory. This knowledge shapes how she evaluates every hotel and design decision she encounters, particularly evident in her work based in Milan.
The real barrier to independent taste is not intelligence but access to accumulated cultural capital. Choe acknowledges that privilege enables the kind of exposure—travel, education, time in museums, conversations with architects and designers—that trains the eye and mind to make distinctions rather than default to consensus. Without this foundation, even well-intentioned hospitality operators and guests tend to follow what industry media and influencers have already validated as desirable.
Why most people cannot build independent taste without privilege
The hospitality industry itself reinforces this dynamic. As Choe discusses in the episode, the concentration of wealth and access creates a self-perpetuating system: those with exposure to beauty, design, and culture develop discernment, while everyone else follows signals from media, Instagram travel accounts, and branded luxury narratives.
This is not a moral failing—it is structural. Without direct experience in diverse architectural traditions, without time studying how light and material interact across different climates, without exposure to how different cultures solve the problem of hospitality, a person has no framework against which to judge what makes a space genuinely beautiful or functional versus merely expensive or trendy.
"True luxury is about removing the need to make decisions. You want someone thinking of your needs before you ask."
Nadine Choe — Founder of The Stanza, former real estate developer on billion-dollar hospitality projects including the Aman Beverly Hills and The One. Based in Milan, Choe combines deep expertise in real estate capital and design philosophy to analyze how taste functions as competitive advantage in luxury hospitality.
Over the coming decade, nearly $80 trillion in assets will be inherited by millennials and Gen Z, many of whom have had exposure to global travel and cultural institutions unprecedented in their families' histories. Yet Choe emphasizes that this wealth will not automatically generate taste—without the reflective habit of analyzing why one space feels beautiful while another feels empty, even inherited capital will default to following influencer recommendations and branded luxury narratives.
See also
What structural factors in hospitality capital and financing drive the industry toward sameness and risk-averse design rather than distinctive taste?
Groups with institutional investor backing must scale aggressively and mitigate investment risk, so they replicate proven models like SoHouse's membership approach rather than experimenting with distinctive design and taste-driven differentiation.
How should luxury hospitality operators define and differentiate true luxury from lifestyle hotels to avoid guest disappointment?
True luxury in hospitality is fundamentally about removing the need for guests to make decisions and spend time on logistics—anticipating their needs before they ask, whereas lifestyle hotels operate on a transactional, self-service model.
Why are major luxury conglomerates like LVMH rapidly expanding into hospitality rather than focusing solely on luxury goods?
Luxury goods experienced massive growth through the rise of the Chinese middle class, making multi-billion dollar businesses. However, the market is now saturated, while nearly 80% of the world's wealthiest individuals would rather invest in experiences than products, making hospitality a high-growth capital opportunity.