Beginning with Mark Twain in its early days, the luminaries who passed through the Hotel Chelsea over the decades—Stanley Kubrick, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Andy Warhol among them—infused it with a captivating, enigmatic air.

But gradually, the storied New York property lost its sparkle, its well-preserved soul hidden under layers of neglect, until its new owners Sean MacPherson, Richard Born, and Ira Drukier revitalized it.

In 2022, the hoteliers, who are responsible for helping to change the Downtown New York hotel scene with classics the Maritime, the Bowery, the Jane, the Ludlow, and the Marlton, unveiled their luxe interpretation of the Hotel Chelsea with 158 guestrooms and suites that pay respect to the heritage 1884 building.

The Hotel Chelsea “is an important part of the fabric of New York,” says MacPherson, who took the lead on the design. “These projects are personal, and I have an emotional investment in them. They feel like being invited into someone’s home, especially as the world gets increasingly corporatized and homogenized. It’s not so much that I’m bringing the best ideas, but (I’m bringing) real, human ones.”

Plentiful artists, writers, and musicians roamed through the corridors of the Hotel Chelsea over the years and MacPherson was careful to honor that era by keeping quirky design elements intact. Accommodations, for example, boast pre-war apartment-style 10-foot-high ceilings that “current economic thought wouldn’t allow,” he says. Artwork was salvaged, and the central staircase remains in place.

Often, haunts like the Hotel Chelsea “don’t survive,” explains MacPherson, “but it was designed to be a bohemian enclave, and through 140 years, it has maintained that character. We tried to be architecturally accurate and emotionally consistent.”

There were many challenges too, like losing the building permits midway through construction and battling to gain them back in an independent administrative law court. “I’m not sure how many people would be able to survive the slings and arrows that were thrown at us,” says Born. Nevertheless, pressing ahead was a rewarding endeavor because “it had nothing to do with financial gain. It was so iconic that we had to do it. It’s the pinnacle of my career to get this over the finish line.”

Born and Drukier, the visionaries propelling BD Hotels—their fathers were also partners in the real estate business—first collaborated with MacPherson in the early 2000s. MacPherson and Eric Goode (who would also lend his savvy to the Bowery, the Jane, and the Maritime hotels) owned New York restaurant the Park at the time and had just acquired the Maritime. “I liked the building, this sort of midcentury modernism I was familiar with coming from California,” recalls MacPherson. But the duo needed financial assistance and turned to Born and Drukier, who had also bid on the property, as potential partners.

After determining how much all four of them would invest, Born took on the financing and formulated a no-nonsense plan. “We are going to roll up our sleeves. We’re going to work as hard as we can. Nobody takes a salary. Nobody takes a promotion. “We’re four musketeers who will do whatever it takes to build the best product and make it successful,” he remembers establishing at the outset of the deal.

When it opened in 2003, the Maritime was an instant hit, in part because locals flocked to its F&B venues. “We effectively created a small neighborhood, which was just the beginning of the Meatpacking District,” Born adds.

MacPherson, Born, and Drukier never sought out careers in hospitality, but their entries into the industry, shaped by disparate backgrounds, were serendipitous. Drukier founded a semiconductor computer chip company, which he sold to Siemens when he decided to explore real estate, the field that Born crossed into upon realizing after his surgical residency that he didn’t want to practice medicine.

MacPherson, who was a successful nightclub promoter before he decided to open his own bar and then restaurant in Los Angeles, describes his rise on the nightlife scene as an “accidental success that continued to snowball.” His critical thinking skills were informed as an only child raised primarily in Malibu, California by a single mother. A surf champion of Mexican and Scottish descent, she was the type to put the groceries in the snow when they lived in a hotel without a refrigerator in Aspen, Colorado for a short time when he was in grammar school.

That boldness—plus his time spent traveling with her to places like Mexico and New Zealand—had a profound influence on MacPherson. “There is always more than one way to solve a problem. It was in my mother’s nature to do it in an unconventional way,” he points out.

BD Hotels was born from the reboot of a Howard Johnson’s at Newark Liberty International Airport, paving the way to a cache of Midtown Manhattan properties converted into boutique sanctuaries.

The company acquired an even more glamorous sheen when it ventured downtown to SoHo, joining forces with André Balazs on the Mercer in 1997 (BD Hotels now owns it outright), which Born and Drukier most recently rejuvenated with the restaurant Sartiano’s. In 2008, BD Hotels and Robert De Niro worked together to open the Greenwich Hotel in a former Tribeca parking lot.

The Bowery Hotel arrived in 2007 in a gritty Lower East Side location, fueled by a timeless atmosphere MacPherson strives to elicit in all his properties. “It’s not that we are trying to tell a literal narrative that this is the Bowery,” he says. “We’re more conjuring a feeling of New York.” Throughout their work together, they have infused each property with a magical feeling that encourages guests to linger.

Now the team is setting its sights on South Florida with the 201-key Nora Hotel in West Palm Beach, slated for 2026 as part of the city’s new masterplanned Nora District comprising retail and condominiums.

In the past, it was a “billionaire’s bunker,” according to Born, but West Palm Beach also teems with a more youthful demographic. For the first time, MacPherson will have design partners—Stantec will handle the architecture and New York-based Gachot the interiors—but Born set the tone with an experimental design process of his own.

Drawn from images of 20th-century architect Addison Mizner’s Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival structures, Born printed out various façades, cut them out with scissors, and layered them over the Nora Hotel building with tape. The others said it was “magnificent, but I was careful at the beginning not to say it was me (who did it),” he admits.

Long entrenched in New York, MacPherson is eager to plunge into West Palm Beach, too. “It’s dynamic and still establishing itself. Architecturally, it reminds me of Los Angeles. “It has these similar low-slung 1930s Mediterranean buildings, which I know well,” he says.

When the Nora debuts, it will be marked by the same level of service that defines the trio’s other hotels. Pointing to Faith No More’s 1985 song We Care A LotMacPherson adds that he’s “always loved that notion,” which is reflected in prioritizing the happiness of his customers. “Of course it’s a business, but it’s also an emotional enterprise. There are people behind these places who care.”

This article originally appeared in HD’s July 2024 issue.