GENERATOR BUILT ITS BUSINESS ON THE HOSTEL CONCEPT . JUST DON ’ T CALL IT THAT ANYMORE .

By DAVID EISEN

A four-bed room at Generator Washington D . C .

n 2005 , the film director Eli Roth made a movie that gave hostels a really bad name . Putting the ludicrous plot and gory violence aside , “ Hostel ,” a film about two college students and their bad travel choices , cast hostels in a very seedy light , which , frankly , some are . But layering on murder and mayhem only aggravated the perception . To borrow from the late Richard Lewis , this was the hostel from hell . Worse , the success of the movie produced two sequels , equally risible and bloodthirsty , but further opportunity to denigrate the accommodation type .

Alastair Thomann , the fresh-faced , half-German , half-English CEO of Generator and Freehand Hotels , has heard it all and seen it all , including the “ Hostel ” franchise , which , unsurprisingly , he doesn ’ t like , but can ’ t avoid its cultural phenomenon . “ Everybody in the U . S . has seen this fricking movie , which in Europe , nobody knows about ,” he said recently from Generator Washington DC , which is situated in the city ’ s Kalorama neighborhood and across Connecticut Avenue from the Washington Hilton , a hotel that holds some macabre allure of its own . In March 1981 , John Hinckley Jr . attempted to assassinate then President Ronald Reagan there ; colloquially , the hotel is known by the sobriquet the “ Hinckley Hilton .” Generator DC is also just a quick stroll away from President Barack Obama ’ s D . C . residence , always secured by a

protective phalanx .

On a Friday morning in May , the hotel has the expected look of a hostel-type accommodation : a throng of out-of-town students crowd the lobby area , in wait to set out no doubt for the myriad museums and monuments of

An executive king room at the upcoming Generator Paramount in New York . The 600-room hotel is owned by Aby Rosen ’ s RFR and is slated to open in September .

the nation ’ s capital . When they clear , one quickly gets the sense that this is anything but some dimly lit property of disrepute . Off the lobby to the right , a hip , sunlight-filled coffee bar and cafe , while through the lobby is Hoja Taqueria , which has quickly become a local favorite for Mexican food , good tequila and salsa dancing on the weekend .

It makes sense , then , that Generator dropped the hostel appendage from its name soon after Thomann was appointed CEO in 2017 and around the time it opened its first state-side property in Miami . There is the connotation it wanted to shed , sure , but at

the time of the decision , it wasn ’ t made to distance itself from the millennials and Gen Zers ( Generator ’ s sweet spot is 18 to 28 ), who still loved the “ community ” concept and atmosphere , of which the brand was built on . Rather , as Thomann explained , it was

more about the notion that these properties sat somewhere between hostels and boutique , lifestyle hotels .

BANKROLLING THE BRAND Generator is also now institutionalized . Its roots stretch back almost 30 years to London , where siblings Louise and Kingsley Duffy established one property before opening one thereafter in Berlin . Eight years later , private equity shop Patron Capital took over ownership and quickly grew the brand to 12 properties across Europe , from Paris to Amsterdam , Rome to Stockholm .

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