The New Luxury Hospitality—From Hong Kong’s Exclusivity To Colorado

Luxury hospitality has spent the last decade chasing the same coordinates: waterfront cities, branded ski villages, and resort islands already fluent in thread counts and tasting menus. The more interesting wager now is happening off that map. In Montrose, a Western Slope agricultural town of about 20,000 people that travelers have historically used as a gateway to Telluride and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Typhoon Hospitality is trying to prove that the next luxury destination is not a new tower – it is a historic civic building, a tightly run dining room, and an operator trained in rooms where membership itself is the product.

That operator is Edward Read, group general manager of Typhoon Hospitality, the Montrose-based hospitality arm of Hong Kong’s Typhoon Group. His last major posting was as general manager of the Aberdeen Marina Club, the Shangri-La–managed private club on Hong Kong Island whose individual memberships have long been priced in the multimillion–Hong Kong-dollar range—on the order of US$500,000 and up, depending on the market. He oversaw the full club and marina operation and a staff of roughly 400. The question he is now answering in public is whether those standards travel to a rural American Main Street.

Montrose is not an obvious luxury canvas. It is a working town with an Art Deco civic core, ranch-country supply lines, and a downtown that has only recently begun to collect the ingredients of a stay-over destination—most visibly the 17-room Rathbone Hotel, which reopened a fire-damaged 1909 landmark in 2024 and helped demonstrate that historic lodging can hold in this market. Typhoon is betting that the next layer is not another chain flag. It is a hospitality ecosystem with a Hong Kong pedigree and a Colorado address.

Dining First, Then Keys

The company has opened two restaurants in the former Daily Bread building on East Main Street, a block that already carries local mythology: Typhoon Group founder and CEO Alia Eyres worked there as a teenager. Ms So (pronounced “Miss So”) is the more immediate concept—an Asian noodle bar that treats night-market cooking as a luxury of flavor rather than of formality. The room is a walk-in, the music is curated, and the menu runs from pork ramen and Hong Kong–style noodles to Japanese fried chicken, bao, and Korean-leaning braised beef. It is the kind of restaurant luxury travelers now look for when they are tired of the hotel steakhouse: specific, urban in energy, and unembarrassed about being a neighborhood place.

Persimmon, next door, is the more ceremonial half of the pair: an Asian-inspired steakhouse built for shareable, farm-to-table dining that puts Colorado product against the structure of an Asian grill. A third restaurant is in development; the company has not yet released the concept. Read’s team treats the openings less as a restaurant rollout than as a rehearsal for service culture—the part of luxury that cannot be designed into a façade.

That is the hospitality peg. Contemporary luxury, especially after the last cycle of maximalist resorts, has moved toward what Forbes Travel Guide and independent luxury writers have been calling authenticity with standards: fewer marble lobbies, more buildings that already mean something, and kitchens that taste like a place rather than a brand book. Montrose gives Typhoon both the constraint and the differentiator. There is no ocean. There is heritage brick, high-desert light, and a town that still has to live with whatever gets built.

A Résumé Built For Exacting Rooms

Read’s career is useful here not as a biography but as an operating system. Before the Aberdeen Marina Club, he moved through Mandarin Oriental, The Ritz-Carlton, Shangri-La, and Swire Hotels, then into Asia’s private golf-club world. Hotel luxury and club luxury are related but not identical. Hotels sell a night. Clubs sell belonging, repetition, and the expectation that the same guest will notice if the service slips on the fourteenth visit. That muscle—staff development, consistency, the quiet theater of recognition—is what Typhoon is trying to transplant into a 30-person team at the Montrose restaurants.

Sleeping in City Hall

The long play is architectural. Typhoon Properties acquired Montrose’s 1926 City Hall, a National Register Art Deco landmark designed by J. H. Antrobus and built as both seat of government and city library, with the intent of converting it into a roughly 50-key boutique hotel with two restaurants. The adjacent Fire House, a 1910 structure on the city’s historic register that once stabled horses on the ground floor and housed firefighters above, is slated for a restaurant that completes the hotel’s culinary circuit.

This is adaptive reuse in the current luxury idiom: the building is the amenity. Guests are not being asked to admire a facsimile of history. They are being asked to sleep inside the former center of civic life. If the hotel is executed with the discipline Read’s résumé implies—bespoke enough to feel intimate, rigorous enough to satisfy travelers who know Mandarin Oriental and Ritz-Carlton from the inside—the property could do for Montrose what a handful of small historic hotels have done for other American towns that were never supposed to be destinations: give sophisticated travelers a reason to stay two nights instead of changing planes.

The company has also framed the City Hall project as a talent pipeline, with a partnership orientation toward Colorado Mesa University’s hospitality training. That is not a soft talking point. Rural luxury fails when it cannot staff to standard. A 50-key hotel in a town this size will live or die on whether it can recruit, train, and keep people who can deliver club-level service without a deep bench of international labor.

Why The Bet Is Larger Than Montrose

The economic case is familiar: jobs, foot traffic, ancillary retail, a more complete downtown. The cultural case is sharper. Montrose has spent years as infrastructure for other people’s vacations. A boutique hotel in a protected civic landmark, flanked by restaurants that are neither generic American bistro nor theme-park “Asian,” changes the town’s offer from transit to place.

It also tracks a broader industry shift. Operators who made their names in Asia’s most rarefied hotels and clubs are increasingly looking at secondary American markets where real estate still has narrative value and where a sense of place has not been fully priced in. The risk is obvious. Luxury guests are unforgiving, historic conversions are expensive, and a mountain town’s seasonality can punish a year-round P&L. The opportunity is equally clear. The travelers now defining high-end demand—those who want discretion, craft, and a story they cannot get in a glass tower—are already bored with the obvious map.

Read’s argument, stripped of development language, is that people are the inventory. Buildings can be restored. Menus can be written. What cannot be improvised is a culture that treats a noodle bar on Main Street with the same seriousness as a private club on the Hong Kong waterfront. The intention is not to become a new Aspen. It may become something more current: a small city where luxury is local, historic, and operationally exacting—and where the destination is no longer somewhere else.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com