By John Wogan
How do you design spaces that carry the polish of world-class hospitality without losing the feeling of an actual home? It’s a question that has grown more complex as the branded residence has evolved well beyond its origins, when the concept was essentially a hotel room. It has since become something far more interesting—and livable—shaped by thoughtful design collaborations and a bit of Montage and Pendry ingenuity, across projects from Mexico City’s Roma Norte to the Caribbean. Here, the industry’s top architects and designers weigh in on the secret to making a house a home.
The Art of Arrival
Pendry Residences Nashville
Gallery-like interiors that balance theatrical detail with the warmth of home.
For Brooklyn-based design studio Post Company, Pendry Residences Nashville began with a single, clarifying question: What should it feel like to arrive home? The studio treated the residences’ lobby not as a grand gesture but as a moment of pause, a conscious escape from Broadway’s kinetic energy defined by pared-back forms and richly layered materiality. That tension between restraint and warmth became the project’s governing logic, according to Jou-Yie Chou, Post Company’s co-founder and partner.
The spaces were conceived as a kind of gallery/loft hybrid. The firm was handed white walls and floor-to-ceiling glass, offering structural neutrality against which they could add distinctive furnishings, found objects, and art that could accumulate meaning over time. “The idea was for guests to feel as though they were visiting a worldly friend’s home, and alludes to the charm of Southern hospitality,” Chou says. Bathrooms lean elegant and spare, with strong-veined marble, hardwood cabinetry, framed artwork, and stone vanities—elements that add just enough personality to feel lived-in.
Post Company, whose portfolio spans hospitality and high-end residential, describes Pendry Residences Nashville as a convergence of two parallel aims, bringing residential warmth to hotel environments, and injecting a sense of theater into permanent living spaces. The result, across lobbies, event spaces, and private residences alike, is a cohesive design language that feels effortless precisely because of the thoughtfulness behind every detail.
The Anti-Showroom
Pendry Residences Tampa
Tactile materials, natural light and a softer alternative to showroom-style luxury.
Toronto-based Studio Munge has become one of the most trusted names in residential hospitality design, and its growing body of work for Pendry spans from beach destinations like Barbados and Punta Mita to cities such as Chicago and Tampa. The studio, founded by Alessandro Munge, approaches each project as a study in how people actually want to live. “We focus on proportion, natural light, and a material palette that feels honest and tactile,” Munge says. It’s a deceptively simple mandate that looks vastly different depending on the location.
At Pendry Residences Tampa, a 38-story waterfront tower on the downtown Riverwalk, Munge placed a strong emphasis on materiality like warm walnut, stone, and muted earth tones to create a sense of place that feels simultaneously familiar and inspiring (think California modernism meets coastal Florida). In Punta Mita, at the forthcoming Pendry, the studio is focusing on architectural detailing within a minimal, organic, nature design concept, with pops of color from handcrafted Mexican objects and artworks. What ties the portfolio together is a shared resistance to over-composition. Studio Munge has moved deliberately away from the showroom aesthetic that defined an earlier era of luxury residential design, toward something softer and more inhabited-feeling, each project beginning with its own distinct narrative—and promising a unique living experience that feels like home from day one.
The Spirit of the City
Pendry Residences Mexico City
Locally rooted materials and Mexican modernism designed to age with character.
W“Mexico City has a design culture that is visceral and completely sure of itself,” says William Harris, co-founder and principal at AvroKo, a global studio headquartered in New York City. For the firm’s work on Pendry Residences Mexico City, that presented a specific creative tension: How much of the city do you welcome in?
The answer, Harris says, was less about direct reference and more about absorbing a certain spirit, particularly the legacy of Mexican modernism and architects like Luis Barragán, Mario Pani, and Juan O’Gorman, whose work combined international modernism with vibrant color, pre-Hispanic form, and an attunement to nature. That sensibility, filtered through the confident architecture of the building by Central de Arquitectura, shaped AvroKo’s approach from the start. In the lobby, it shows up in elements such as traditional textile patterns and 16-foot-tall pivot doors that open onto lush patios.
In the 20 residences, the approach is more subtle. The materials are still local and handmade, but a home, as Harris puts it, “should know where it is without making a statement about it every time you walk into a room.” Thus, a feeling of permanence pervades through materials like stone, solid timber, and plaster—all chosen for how they’ll age naturally and beautifully. “In Mexico City, that felt especially resonant,” Harris says. “The craft traditions behind those choices aren’t trends. They’re hundreds of years old.” The architecture and material envelope are built to endure; the softer layers—fabrics, objects, accessories—are conceived with enough flexibility to change depending on the owner’s taste. “The real test isn’t how a space looks on opening day; it’s how well it holds its character when everything around it keeps moving.
