11 minute read
The Memorymakers
from CCR Issue 10
Hospitality in Commercial Construction
Inside the dynamic powerhouse that is the Landmark Hospitality brand
The Cretella family opened their first Jersey City waterfront property, Liberty House, in 2001. The opening reconfirmed the family’s status as a dynamic powerhouse in the world of hospitality. Prior to New Jersey, Jeanne and Frank Cretella, who built Landmark Hospitality from the ground up, owned and operated properties in New York City, Brooklyn and Battery Park. Today, Landmark owns and operates 11 distinctive venues, boutique hotels and restaurants throughout New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Their “Memorymakers” team, the name they give those who create memories for their patrons, specialize in fine dining, weddings, corporate events, on-site catering and destination events. To get an inside look at the Landmark Hospitality brand (and where it is heading), we sat down with Frank Cretella, co-founder and principal of the Landmark Companies.
Give us a snapshot of the Landmark brand?
Founded in 2001, Landmark Hospitality is a multi-faceted, familyowned company specializing in adaptive restoration, primarily with landmarked or historical properties. Dedicated to preserving history while optimizing the guest experience, Landmark is known as memorymakers––the team sees a project through inception and construction to design and daily operations. Landmark does it all––restaurants, weddings, catering, hotels and spas—and has plans to expand further into distilleries and entertainment within the next few years.
What type of consumer are you targeting?
As an event-driven hospitality company, we target young couples for their weddings. We take that initial major event as a way for them to bond with the brand and everything else we have to offer. The key component to our consumer base is that they are active and love new experiences, giving us a wide target demographic of the late 20s to 60s.
How does the design cater to what today’s consumers want?
Consumers want to experience destinations and venues, and our designs create dynamic environments for people to come together and enjoy each other’s company. We use our restaurants, lobbies, and rooftops as integral pieces of our hotel brand. In hotels, our design is meant to spark interest to explore details and entice repeat business. For example, the Logan Inn was originally built in 1727 (it is one of the oldest operating inns in America), and it is connected to a new building through a hyphen on all four floors. We intentionally show the infrastructure where the two buildings connect to spark curiosity. Customers want authenticity and craftsmanship. That’s why we make most of the furniture for our projects in-house, and what we don’t create, we source from luxury purveyors and estate sales. We are always on the lookout for iconic design pieces.
Walk us through your design process.
Hotels are no longer designed exclusively for the traveler, but are designed and programmed to be a community hub and gathering place. Today’s travelers want to experience the local vibe, and what better way to experience that than hanging out with the locals themselves.
Take us through your construction and design strategy.
We like to open things up throughout the property––exposing parts of the building that
are typically not shown in your average establishments like wine cellars, waiter stations, food pantries and kitchens. We utilize open floor plans between the lobby, restaurant, bars and retail. We set scenes or zones, so people feel comfortable once seated, but intrigued by the design details of the property as a whole, making many people repeat guests. We accomplish the zones predominantly through different ceilings and lighting.
What’s the biggest issue today related to construction?
Similar to the rest of the industry, we see our material costs skyrocket and lead times for materials extend. To overcome this challenge, we’ve been going to our shop where we have a decade of reclaimed lumber (we built up inventory here from the various demolition projects we’ve done in the past) to look for pieces we can reuse. We’ve added equipment to process this material to meet our material demand to no longer rely solely on outside sources.
Talk about sustainability.
We are putting electric car chargers in our parking lots and we have been using solar panels to generate 10% of the establishment’s electricity usage. We are fanatics for reclaimed products and repurposing materials like old doors to bars, wrought iron fencing to tables, and beams into floorboards. On the operation side we utilize local farmers within 50 miles of the site, we have organic chef gardens at many of our locations and even have beehives for our own honey.
What are some of your biggest opportunities moving ahead?
I see pockets of real opportunities as municipalities want to divest themselves of historic properties that are expensive to maintain. They can bring these properties back on the tax rolls and, with us revitalizing these sites and turning them into successful hospitality businesses, spur further redevelopment in an area.
Are you optimistic about what you see out there?
I’m mostly optimistic for the markets we have always focused on. We’ve already begun to see the surge in event and hotel inquiries and bookings ever since the vaccine took hold. As an event-driven hospitality company, we discover and bring back to life unique venues and destination towns just outside of major cities. I can also foresee corporate travel emerging quicker than I initially expected, which is a good sign for many operators and an added bonus for us.
What are some of the adjustments you’ve made recently?
We instinctively have always followed three principles in our business. Automate the mundane but necessary, and personalize everything else. Compete with unique quality over price. And focus on revenue over costs. The pandemic was almost a blessing in that it gave us the time to look at and analyze everything we did as a company while we still adhered to those three core principles. For example, we’ve outsourced bookkeeping so our accounting team is focused on analytics and communication to the venues. We incorporated technology to allow for keyless check-in, online group booking and centralized reservations that allows the front desk staff to become a parlour (Landmark’s type of lobby space) hosts. This way, they have the time to enjoy the guests and improve their stay. We are a company that views itself as support to the people who run each venue. We’ve based our growth on having the best management teams at the venue level. We then support them so the emphasis is on how we can improve our support and free them up so that they can work closer with their team and the guests. This was our amplified mission during the pandemic.
Why did you pick the locations you did for your hotels?
We are not typical in that we don’t want that heavily traveled intersection or to be next to an airport or a pharmaceutical company. We pick locations that we can make a destination. Our average sized property is ten acres and the main structure is set back from the road and usually not visible. Our main criteria is that the property is unique and prefer it be adaptive reuse of a
Hospitality in Commercial Construction The Memorymakers
historic structure or warehouse. The other type of hotel location we look for is in those destination towns and iconic existing hotels that we can expand and update to become current and regain or expand their title as the center of their community.
What’s your growth plan?
We’re targeting adaptive reuse of historic structures, warehouses and estates into thriving hospitality venues. We also are targeting those iconic inns in destination towns that have the land to expand. The further we move from our base of operation the larger the project needs to be to support the depth of management we rely on.
What trends are you seeing?
Smaller hotels are known for giving personalized services and are more in-demand from luxury travelers. Common areas of a hotel that can serve as an extension of a person’s living room where they feel comfortable using the space to entertain, conduct business, or read the newspaper in the morning. Hotels have become live, work, play spaces for the locals.
What’s the secret to creating a “must visit” property today?
You have to layer in authentic experiences with design, materials, music and local culture. We engage guests with our programming such as cooking and cocktail classes, special vintage dinners, farm-to-table dinners and our upcoming festival series. A new program is our 4:00 o’clock tea party, where guests are invited to our hotel or a local spot in the neighborhood to participate as a group in things like “Sushi & Sake,” where guests will learn how to roll sushi from a chef. Another program is “fondue and champagne” at the bar where a community of hotel guests can get together and talk about their day. We have also had guests work with our chefs to make family meals or boozy ice cream sundaes. We like to invite guests to have fun and participate in unique activities!
Hospitality in Commercial Construction The Memorymakers
What is today’s consumer looking for?
Authentic experiences, design, craftsmanship, surprises and delightful moments. Everything else is expected and only noticed when it’s not there or not done well.
What’s the biggest item on your to-do list?
One of the items that is always on my list is to further perfect and optimize our process for organically designing and building hotels. Completion of the Logan Inn, Village Hall Restaurant and Beer Garden, Hudson House, Elkins Estate Phase 1, as well as all the renovations at existing properties need to be complete in 2021.
Describe a typical day.
I’m up at 5:30 a.m. and review all the previous day’s construction reports over coffee. I prepare for the day with my target “to-do list.” Bring my email box to zero and send out emails to my key team. By 7 a.m. I’m ready for my six-mile walk. I usually listen to “GaryVee Audio Experience” or a “Masters of Scale” podcast, while other times I make calls to people I want to stay in touch with. By 10 a.m. I’m usually driving to an area where I can visit several of our venues that are either established or under construction. This usually takes about three hours. For lunch, I always eat with at least four people from the location that I am visiting. Usually it is the foreman, finish craftsman or masons. Other times I will have lunch with local community leaders, business owners and venue managers. By 2:30 p.m., I’m headed to my office which these days can mean office, home, or boat. To finish my day, dinner is usually around 7 p.m. at my local neighborhood restaurant or when I have the energy to start a fire in the pizza oven and cook. What makes the Landmark brand so unique?
We are unique in many ways as we handle all aspects of a project. Underwriting, acquisition, entitlement, branding, design, construction, and operations. We are truly bespoke as we build everything we have with our own team of artisans, many who have been with our company for 20+ years. What sets us apart the most is how we make people feel through our brand of hospitality. We are a family business and work very hard at developing personal relationships with our teams, which translates into how they treat each other and our guests. We are a chef-driven company with every property, including our hotels having the chef run the facility on par with the general manager. We have a full-time team that creates and executes the experiences we offer, from cooking classes to bocce tournaments.
One-on-One with Landmark Hospitality’s Frank Cretella
What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
Seeing people making lifelong memories in the spaces we create. Whether it’s a wedding couple or a family dining in the restaurant, we truly have a passion for creating/making memories for our guests. We even call our team members “Memorymakers” for this very reason. (Memorymaker: One who practices the art of creating moments into memories) I also feel rewarded when I see long-standing team members advance in their careers with us.
Best advice you ever received?
Enjoy the process of making your dreams a reality, not just the accomplishment itself.
Best thing a client ever said to you?
I have two quotes. The first was that someone said their favorite restaurant is one of ours and that they know the owner personally (it's one of our managers). It shows our whole mission behind this company is working. Another one is, “I don’t know where I want my wedding yet, but I know I want a Landmark wedding.”
Three strongest traits a leader should have.
Always strive to learn. This includes listening to your team. Have the ability and discipline to think strategically long-term while making an incremental difference every day. And have empathy. To me, that’s the ability to view everything you want to do from the side that will be affected.
What is the true key to success for any manager?
There are many components that are important and necessary as a baseline. Of course, you must have integrity, empathy and communication skills, but also passion. I think that is the single component that amplifies everything else into results.
