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Hotel Heron in Alexandria, Va., is part of Hilton’ s Curio Collection. It sits within Aparium For, a third-party management platform developed for soft brands. Photo credit: Wade Hall |
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days. Aparium’ s first property was The Iron Horse Hotel in Milwaukee.
It wasn’ t just about miles on an odometer. As Tricoci tells it, the Midwest had a dearth of, call them, quality, boutique hotels— it was a pu pu platter of Hilton this or Marriott that.“ There were a lot of great and important soulful cities that lacked interesting hospitality products,” he said.
Tricoci sold his majority stake in The Elysian in 2011 to Sam Zell. A year later, he got Aparium off the ground, setting out on smaller markets, such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, searching for development opportunities in the $ 20- to $ 30-million range.“ We had a limited budget. We had to be really thoughtful about partnerships,” he said. What they did have was a unique perspective that they honed
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at The Elysian, one built on a grass-roots, almost guerilla effort in efforts like sales and marketing and culinary.“ We thought about F & B completely differently. We thought about the local market,” he said.“ What we celebrated at The Elysian, I brought that as foundational elements to Aparium.”
INDIE, INDEED The Midwest focus was as much their idea as their customers. Guests would remark upon leaving The Elysian that they wished there was something similar around the region.“ People would say,‘ God, I wish we had something that felt relevant. Something symbolic of the city that’ s not a Hilton Garden Inn or Courtyard by Marriott.’”
The vision was independent from the jump with a trans-local business model of developing adaptive reuse lifestyle projects
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in secondary markets.“ It was easy access, low-hanging fruit, where there was white space,” Tricoci told HOTELS Magazine back in 2020.
They raised money from friends and family, carried equity in projects and hit a stride in managing.“ I took the time to educate myself and our team about the city. That’ s how we felt like we could differentiate ourselves,” he said. Aparium had success out of the gate on its first few projects. As it grew, it began to tap into alternative sources of financing; for instance, Starwood Capital became a CMBS lender, buying into Aparium’ s independent breed of hotels that generated as much as half its revenue from F & B and before it even employed a proper reservations system, as Tricoci told it.
Momentum built. Investors took notice. Aparium was
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inundated with calls. But it was no free-for-all: Despite its successes, Aparium had no intention of growing for the sake of growth.“ We wanted to be very thoughtful and steadfast:‘ Is it the right market? Is it the right partner? Is it the right time?’” Tricoci said.
FOR MORE Aparium is a management company that thinks like an owner. It third-party operates about half of the portfolio.“ We’ re a very good match for an owner that wants to play in the lifestyle space, wants something unique and takes significant pride in their community,” Tricoci said, positioning Aparium like an atelier that wades in deep on design and programming.
Earlier this year, Aparium launched Aparium For, a thirdparty management platform
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24 hotelsmag. com July / August 2026 |