Meghan McEwen, a travel writer, has always been on the lookout for interesting, design-oriented places to stay.
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Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
Eastern Market in Detroit. Ms. McEwen opened an inn in the city in 2011.
"I don't mean high design and fancy furniture by big-name designers," she clarified. In fact, high-end hotels, she has found, rarely reflect the places where they are. Instead, she likes to scout out quirky family-owned inns and neighborhood-oriented hotels that exhibit "design in a more thoughtful, personally curated way."
After having discovered so many beautiful properties, from bare-bones cabins to luxurious hotels, many of which get little news media coverage, Ms. McEwen decided, in 2010, to start the blog Design Tripper to showcase some of them.
"I wanted to champion this type of experience," she said. And in 2011, she started offering it, opening an inn of her own, Honor and Folly, in her home city, Detroit.
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. McEwen on how she has gone from covering inns to owning one.
On the pleasures of the not-so-high-end: Last summer, we stayed at this little place called Arco dei Tolomei in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, the old Jewish quarter. The owner was a dapper character, and the inn was his home, which had been in his family for 200 years. He met us at the door, gave our kids chocolate milk for breakfast, didn't stare at them to make sure they weren't going to break something, even though it was an absolutely beautiful space. It had parquet floors, dark wooden beams, old wallpaper everywhere. Our bedrooms had terraces that overlooked this gorgeous patchwork of terra-cotta rooftops and winding cobblestone streets. One night there was this Jewish festival, and we went out on the terrace to watch. My kids were so in awe. I felt like this was only happening because we decided to seek out something a little more interesting — and less expensive — than a really fancy hotel. And now anytime I go back to Rome, I'm going to stay there.
On travel blogging's fine line: Not booking rooms from my site probably wasn't the best business decision, but bloggers already have a really bad rap for not having editorial integrity. Because I am a writer, I understand what my words mean and what a personal endorsement means, and I didn't want to compromise that by bringing money into it. If I did, I'd be a lot less motivated to write about the two-room inn rather than the 100-room hotel, because with the 100-room hotel I'd have a lot more opportunity to make money. And that was the point of the blog, to get beyond that.
On the bringing the family-owned inn to Detroit: Detroit has such a sensationalized, unsavory reputation in the media, it takes an interesting, intrepid character to want to spend time here, to see beyond the ruins. But there weren't accommodations that matched the tourist. I was once sitting at the bar of the Book Cadillac downtown, and I overheard the bartender tell this hotel guest not to walk around because it's too dangerous. I was so appalled because clearly this person was here because they were interested in Detroit, but the bartender was telling them, essentially, not to be there.
Often the hotel staff doesn't live in the same neighborhood as the hotel, but when you're staying in a smaller place it's all about the neighborhood. I felt like Detroit needed this really immersive, local experience because that's where all of the energy is. Our inn is in Corktown, the city's oldest neighborhood, and I'm able to tell my guests where to get the best pizza, who are the best farmers at Eastern Market, where to see the coolest graffiti because I live here. It's a bit of an antiquated career, innkeeper, but it's making a resurgence because when you're staying in a place where the innkeeper is taking such great care of every detail, you can feel it.
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