Hi, everyone, it's Meredith Carey and you're listening to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Kondy Nass Traveler.

A few weeks ago, my co-host, Lale and I flew over to Los Angeles to meet a bunch of you at our third live taping of the podcast at the Ace Hotel in downtown L.A.

We chatted with Kelly Sodden, partner, and chief brand officer at Ace Hotel Hotel

Group and Atelier Ace about how the Aces creative design launched a new generation of boutique

hotels and how they keep innovating year after year.

Because it was live, the audio isn't our best, but the conversation was so great we just had to share it.

If you want to come to a meetup or live podcast, keep an eye out in the Facebook group,

linked in the show notes, or women who travel.com. I'll let Lolly take it from here. Well, hi, everyone. Thanks for coming

along to our third live episode of Women Who Travel. We are so excited to be here in L.A.

And we are lucky enough to be joined today by Kelly Sorden, who is responsible for making

the hotel we're sitting in look quite as cool as it is.

She is the partner and chief brand officer of the Ace Hotel Group and Atelier Ace,

and she oversees all of the brands in-house creative from the interiors to the architecture

to the graphic design, and her next project is the upcoming Ace Hotel in Kyoto.

And the 20th anniversary of Ace is just around the corner. So it felt like the right time to grill you on a few things.

I'm ready. The first thing I think that we wanted to ask is, you know, the Ace has such a

specific aesthetic when you walk into an Ace hotel, you know exactly where you are.

How would you define that?

So, you know, I think what we've embraced over the years is because all of our hotels

feel really localized, you know, when we're looking at it from a design perspective,

you know, we walk into these buildings and we look at what's

what's existing, what is there, what can we reference, what time period was it built, and

...