Ben Weprin insists he isn’t personally pining for his college days at the University of Tennessee. He has, however, spent the last nine years steadfastly acquiring existing hotels in college towns and revamping their designs to reflect the culture of the nearby universities. “People are in an interesting headspace when they’re going back to their school,” says the 44-year-old developer, “and that emotion is really powerful, so we wanted to create hotels to match that.”
Weprin got the idea for Graduate Hotels in 2008, when he was living in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. He came across a Days Inn and wondered why the area didn’t have a hip hotel (and bar) to serve visiting alumni of DePaul University (and post-game revelers from Wrigley Field). His company, AJ Capital Partners, converted the Days Inn into the Hotel Lincoln, then went on to launch a hotel chain that includes the Graduate Chapel Hill, where guests can tour the Jordan Suite, a replica of UNC alum Michael Jordan’s dorm room, and the Graduate New Haven, which features bespoke lamps shaped like Yale University’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. The 33rd Graduate property, a Stanford University–themed hotel in Palo Alto, California, is now open.
Ahead of that opening and the release of Graduate Hotels, a Rizzoli coffee-table book on his brand, Weprin sat down with Hemispheres in his Nashville office, which overflows with stacks of similar tomes. “My wife thinks it’s too much, but I’m obsessed with coffee-table books,” he says. “A lot of the vintage ones tug at my heart.”
On design inspiration:
“I’d been in the hospitality/real-estate game for years before I noticed this white space in the market. And these projects are super-fun, from a design perspective, with a lot less competition than there is building fancy resorts in St. Barts. We try to create layered backdrops, like sets. For example, around the lobby of our upcoming Princeton, New Jersey, hotel, we’re displaying vintage Reunion ‘beer jackets; at the 25th reunion, each alumni class gets a newly designed one to wear while parading through campus in their so-called ‘P-rade.’ And, for our guest room headboards, we’ve fused together wood canes engraved to resemble the ones [freshmen] attempt to wrestle away from [sophomores] in Princeton’s annual Cane Spree tradition. Our new Graduate Palo Alto’s room keys are mocked up to look like Tiger Woods’s and Reese Witherspoon’s student ID cards. You can’t take yourself too seriously with this stuff.”
On being stewards of history:
“I do a lot of sitting in legacy mom-and-pop owners’ living rooms, trying to convince them we’d be good stewards of this historic building that’s been in their family for generations. We’re sincere in our intent; we want to buy and renovate in a historical way that celebrates the adjacent university. Sometimes we’ve been talking to a potential seller for five, six years—emailed them thousands of times—but that’s what it takes to create value. If you believe in something, you’ve got to keep grinding until it manifests.”
On developing relationships with mentors:
“I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to learn from super-accomplished real estate developers like Barry Sternlicht and Ian Schrager. Barry said to me, ‘Find the freight trains in your life and get on them, instead of in front of them.’ That was instrumental in my thinking when we decided to move my family and company to Nashville.”
On building a world:
“In 2015, my firm bought Nashville’s May Hosiery Mills, this completely run-down sock factory built in 1908. It was a little progressive, because we’re not downtown; we’re just outside, in the Wedgewood- Houston neighborhood, this creative enclave we’re revitalizing. It takes a while. Dude, when [restaurateur] Keith McNally came to town in June 2021, he went around and looked at a bunch of different potential spots. We went after Keith—we’re not bashful about going after things we believe in, and we love Keith. Within five minutes of arriving in the neighborhood, he’s like, ‘I get it. Let’s do it.’ So Pastis is coming in across the street next year. That’s been our whole ethos: Build out the world you wanna live in.”
Next Up: America’s Best College Towns
