How 200+ Countries Taught Me Everything I Know About Interior Design

At 21, I made a decision that would quietly alter the entire trajectory of my life: I immersed myself in the world of luxury boutique hospitality, one property at a time. I was young and without means, but deprivation has never been a deterrent for desire, and I craved the good life fiercely. So I backpacked. And as I backpacked, I observed.

From the moment I stepped onto the sun-bleached sands outside a boutique hotel just outside the small Pacific coastal town of Juluchuca, Mexico, I understood that hospitality would become my guiding meridian throughout everything that followed.

The next fifteen years took me across more than 200 countries, through the corridors and courtyards of properties that would constitute a private design education unlike anything offered in any institution. Secret Bay in Dominica. Six Senses Oman. Naksel Boutique Hotel and Spa in Bhutan. The Four Seasons Santa Fe. The Ritz Paris. Rosewood Montecito. The Siam Bangkok. Six Senses Maldives. Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay. Auberge du Soleil in Napa. Aman, in several of its incarnations. Dozens of others. I moved through these spaces not merely as a guest, but as a student of the sensory experience they curated.

And I began to notice something: cost and star rating were not reliable indicators of resonance. Some properties, regardless of their prestige, left me feeling vaguely hollow upon departure. Others, modest in comparison, sent me back into the world feeling replenished and recalibrated. What was the difference? It was never the thread count. It was always the intention.

I studied the small things obsessively. How was the robe hung? Was it a stiff fabric that had been laundered into submission, or did it carry a softness that made me reach for it instinctively? Was there a small welcoming gesture placed somewhere in the room; local salts near the bath, a hand-written card on the entry-table, something that suggested a human being had actually considered my arrival? Did the valet acknowledge me or look through me? Was the cuisine an authentic expression of the place, or a diluted approximation of what the kitchen imagined a foreigner might want? And when I asked for an extra pillow to accommodate a spine compressed by years of long-haul travel, was I met with generosity or resistance?

Beyond the architecture of service, I was perpetually fascinated by the architecture of a place. What cultural vocabulary did each property speak? Did the landscape outside bleed naturally through the walls and into the interiors, so that you felt genuinely located in that country, that culture, that specific geography? Or did you feel unmoored, deposited into a generic luxury experience that could have existed anywhere on earth?

The answer to those questions, property by property, country by country, became the foundation of everything I now understand about design.

I will never forget a local home I visited in Yemen, the final country that would formally award me two Guinness World Records for traveling to every sovereign nation on earth. I was a guest of a local family, and from the moment I crossed the threshold, it was the design that arrested me first. Flat-woven goat-hair rugs laid with casual confidence over ceramic tile. In the living room, the majlis commanded the space entirely: richly upholstered cushions lining the perimeter of the walls, creating an architecture of intimacy, an invitation to gather, to linger, to belong. Outside, the structure itself had been molded from rammed earth and mud-brick, its walls carrying the warmth of the land from which they came. The Arabian Sea filled every open window, and featherweight drapery moved with the coastal breeze, casting soft, shifting shadows across the tile.

In that house, none of it mattered. Not the impending record. Not the civil war escalating beyond those walls. The people surrounding me, and the home surrounding all of us, conspired to make me forget everything and surrender entirely to the moment. Design, I realized, at its most profound, does exactly that: it dismantles your defenses.

Yemen was not the only local home that left its mark. From Cuba to Costa Rica, Honduras to Egypt, Pakistan to Tajikistan, Libya to England, the invitation into a private home is an unmediated lesson in what makes a home a home, from the objects chosen and the colors trusted, to the way a family configures their space around the life they actually live.

And then there were the boutique properties. The bed and breakfasts. The Airbnbs and Vrbos where hospitality is curated by a single individual’s aesthetic sensibility, unfiltered by corporate design standards.

One of the most indelible examples came during my travels across Africa. I arrived at a small hotel in Bamako, Mali, depleted in a way that is difficult to articulate: the accumulated weight of months of travel pressed into every part of me. I remember very little of that arrival. What I remember vividly is the room.

It bore no cultural allegiance to Mali whatsoever, and yet it remains one of the most memorable spaces I have ever stayed. The aesthetic was unapologetically old money Anglophone: deep charcoal walls, a four-poster bed with dark mahogany finials, equestrian paintings in heavy frames, gallery walls hung with the kind of curios and archive photographs that suggest generations of accumulated history. Tartan cushions. Rich leather. The bones of a British colonial estate transplanted, inexplicably, to West Africa. By any coherent design logic, it should not have worked. And yet it worked completely.

I slept that night with a depth and peace I had not felt in weeks. That, I have come to believe, is the ultimate measure of great design: not whether it follows any identifiable rule, but whether it makes the person inside it feel safe enough to completely let go.

That is what 200 countries taught me. And that is what I build toward every time I enter a room.