On an early fall morning, Ari Heckman and Xavier Donnelly, the C.E.O. and creative director, respectively, of the New York–based hotelier Ash, waited outside an antiques market in the South of France—just one of the many destinations that they had sought out during a breakneck, border-hopping mission to secure singular treasures for an upcoming property.
As Donnelly told me moments before eager buyers sprinted through the opened gates, “The hotel should feel like the home of someone very worldly and well traveled who’s amassed a collection of objects over a lifetime”—and where better to achieve such a goal than Europe, which is home to a handful of biannual trade fairs known for their wealth of heirloom-worthy designs, not to mention slashed asking prices? “It’s really hard to achieve the aesthetic we’re trying to impart only through new creations,” he adds. “These pieces have their own stories and histories, which make a setting feel a lot richer and deeper and allow visitors to get pulled into this mysterious narrative.”
