THE DEAN’S SECOND ACT
Berlin, Munich, and rejection of global sameness
It’s a big year for The Dean. Our first encounter with the Irish hotel group came earlier this year, when it opened its first property outside Ireland in Berlin. Munich followed in July. What you might notice, though, is that the two properties don’t feel all that similar, and maybe that’s the point.
For our Irish readers, the group is hardly new. Its founders, Paddy McKillen Jr. and Matt Ryan, have spent the past two decades building restaurants, bars, cinemas, clubs, and hotels around the shared idea that hospitality should bring the life of a city inside, which is a philosophy we find easy to get excited about.
Historically, though, that ambition has taken the familiar form of the 2010s cheeky-neon-sign-on-the-destination-rooftop. The Dean translated that formula particularly well for an Irish audience, but from the outside, it didn’t always feel especially novel.
The group now has new capital behind it, along with plans to expand well beyond Ireland. And while money doesn’t necessarily buy vision, Berlin and Munich feel like the first signs that The Dean may finally have the room to pursue its original one with a little more depth.
We’ve long been interested in the global sameness emerging across hospitality and design. Even the supposedly design-forward hotel groups aren’t immune. If you build a strong enough aesthetic and repeat it often enough, distinctiveness becomes its own kind of uniform.
The Dean’s answer, at least so far, has been to hand each hotel to a different designer and let the city do more of the work. We don’t think a hotel needs to summarize an entire place, but we do think it should reveal something about where you are, and ideally, something you might not have noticed otherwise.
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In Berlin, Rachael Gowdridge draws on both the refined residential character of Charlottenburg and the city’s more subversive creative traditions, preserving the imperfections of a late-19th-century building while introducing saturated color, vintage furniture, contemporary art, and sculptural lighting.
Munich receives an entirely different treatment from Tatjana von Stein. Her interiors bring together the city’s Jugendstil heritage and its less-remembered role in the music culture of the 1980s, moving from calm, tactile bedrooms into increasingly theatrical public rooms.
Two hotels aren’t enough to call it a playbook just yet, but consider us curious about where The Dean goes next. Miami is due later this year.