Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1533677
As Bunkhouse Hotels' Creative Force, Tenaya Hills Lends an Authentic Eye to Designing Hospitality Gold. As head of design, Tenaya Hills t o u c h e s e v e r y t h i n g associated with Bunkhouse Hotels, from partnering with the best architects and designers in the business to selecting soap dispensers. Known for its quirky and culturally authentic properties that have changed the face of hospitality design, the portfolio includes the recently completed Hotel Saint Augustine, adjacent to The Menil Collection in Houston; Hotel Magdalena, Hotel Saint Cecilia, Austin Motel, Carpenter Hotel, and Hotel San José in Austin; and Hotel Havana in San Antonio, among others. Although Hills' tasks may sound endless, and her tireless attention to detail exhausting, she handles it all with a breezy efficiency — a quality even more impressive when one learns she is self-taught in the world of design. Hills (whose full title is head of design for Bunkhouse Hotels, JdV by Hyatt) earned her master's degree in historic preservation from The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and her natural affinity for appreciating a building's classical bones was honed at an early age. One of eight siblings, she grew up in a 1920s Spanish Mediterranean house in California that helped inform a love of details such as hand-carved stone fireplaces and stained-glass windows. "I always really resonated with old buildings," she says. "I grew up in Old Towne Orange, which has the largest neighborhood collection of Victorian homes. I'm a person who thinks old is better than new, not just because of the style, but because of the feel that old buildings have. They have a lot of depth, history, and soul — you can imagine the people living there." "I've always gravitated to interiors, but it didn't cross my mind as a job I was going to do; I just liked spaces," she says. "I planned to go to art school and be a photographer, or just get a history degree — but what can you do with a history degree? Then I found historical preservation, which is everything I love: photography, history, and architecture." With just a few schools in the United States offering this specialized focus, Hills landed at the University of Texas, conveniently located in a place she'd fallen in love with during a 2006 visit to photograph the South by Southwest music festival. "It was the city at its greatest," she says. "Austin hadn't completely expanded by then, so there was still this small-town feel. It felt so opposite to Southern California. It was so intimate and soulful." In 2008, the then 28-year-old was trying to land an internship when a lawyer turned hotelier by the name of Liz Lambert addressed one of her classes. Hills took the initiative to cold-email Lambert, offering to work for free to get her foot in the door. Her new boss had a nontraditional background as a hotelier; Hills had a nontraditional background as a design assistant. Their unlikely pairing resulted in hospitality gold. "I was the second employee of the creative department," Hills says. "Liz said, 'I just put an ad out on Craigslist; this is serendipity!' All the interiors were done in-house by Liz and me. These were the light Internet days, when you had to figure out how to get French cafe chairs that actually came from France. It was fun and challenging. I learned by doing, to be a little more out of the box and not so by the book." Lambert had already transformed the Hotel San José, a low-slung motor court on a then-seedy end of Congress Avenue in Austin. That airy refurb solidified Bunkhouse's Texas Bohemian aesthetic of highly polished concrete floors, vivid textiles, and ivy-covered courtyards. Hills joined just in time to have a hand in the lifestyle management company's second project: an 1888 Victorian home tucked away off South Congress that Bunkhouse transformed into the elegant rock 'n' roll Hotel Saint Cecilia. Next came a 1914 Mediterranean revival property in San Antonio, the Hotel Havana — a project Hills had 90 days to flip. Then Bunkhouse was on a roll, taking on the Austin Motel, San Francisco's Phoenix Hotel, and the San Cristóbal in Todos Santos, Mexico. As the company expanded, so did Hills' duties. She became a design manager in 2011, a director of design in 2015, and By Kendall Morgan. Portrait Antonio Chicaia. 64 Tenaya Hills, head of design, Bunkhouse Hotels, at Hotel Saint Augustine, Houston