The 252-room 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay on Kauai’ s north shore in Princeville, Hawaii. Photo credit: Makana Weiss |
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THE LEAD UP The anecdote was one of several Sternlicht shared during a 2024 podcast with Graham Bensinger and the least fascinating. His Jewish father survived World War II by hiding out with Czech partisans, at one point shooting and killing two German soldiers in an act of survival. His taciturn father was tough on him growing up, but he instilled in Sternlicht the drive to succeed by putting the work in. As a young boy, Sternlicht would catch tadpoles in a nearby pond and sell them for 10 cents a pop. He also peddled knives door to door, calling it one of the best jobs he ever had.
Cutlery, however, is not where Sternlicht would make his mark. Had he ended up becoming the“ Knives
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King of Stamford,” then HOTELS Magazine would not be recognizing him as the Corporate Hotelier of the World for 2025.
His mother wanted him to be a lawyer. Instead, Sternlicht, a Brown University graduate, went into business, which, for someone with a self-proclaimed math phobia, was a leap. He wanted to work on Wall Street, and while Goldman Sachs showed interest in him, Sternlicht, after a stint as an arbitrage trader, took a position in Chicago with JMB Realty, where he found an early champion in co-founder Neil Bluhm. Despite success with the real estate company, before long, he was out of a job, felled by the savings and loan crisis. He was 30 and his wife was
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pregnant with their first child. He had gone from hanging with Michael Jordan at Bulls games to looking for a job.
Like MJ, Sternlicht had preternatural talent. Not long after, he and Bob Faith, who later founded Greystar, formed Starwood Capital Group, which began by snatching up distressed commercial real estate. It soon became the capital arm of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which Sternlicht founded in 1995 and was chairman and CEO of for 10 years. Starwood’ s acceleration was fueled by early acquisitions of Westin Hotels and fending off Hilton to buy ITT Corp., which gave it the Sheraton hotel chain. Sternlicht later created the seminal W brand, which became the first real scalable
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lifestyle hotel brand. W took cues from legendary hotelier and tastemaker Ian Schrager that had to do as much with style as substance— though, for W, maybe it’ s the same thing. At one point, as Sternlicht retold it, the union-operated W New York had what could be described as unappealing doormen. Sternlicht sent them to the New York Sheraton and installed handsome replacements.
Sternlicht’ s eventual departure from Starwood Hotels was fraught. He left soon after hiring the one-time president of Coca-Cola, Steven Heyer, as CEO. It was a fateful decision. Sternlicht would later call Heyer a megalomaniac, claiming that Heyer dismantled his office, fired Sternlicht loyalists and
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16 hotelsmag. com November 2025 |