Villa Mara Carmel Is One Of America’s Best New Boutique Hotels. The Story Behind Its Founder Is Even Better

Most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t wake up every day dreaming about launching a hotel.

Swapping sheets, setting up the breakfast buffet, de-escalating disgruntled guests, and obsessing over average daily rate metrics isn’t nearly as exhilarating as raising a fat Series A round and burning it all billions-or-bust on launching the next Uber or Instacart.

A lot of independent hotels also are family businesses, so running them is often a generational thing. In other instances, would-be hotel founders grind their way up through the system at goliaths like Marriott or Hilton before going out on their own.

For others still, the hotel gene—that unobligated instinct to care for people and make them happy no matter what it takes—is just in the blood.

Every once in a while, however, all of these traits coalesce around a single person and place. And the results are usually magical. Think of brands like One&Only Resorts and Montage Hotels—both of which remain tightly-owned family businesses decades after they were founded while still setting relentlessly new standards of design, service, and supply restraint.

So, whenever I have the opportunity to meet a hotel founder who grew up in the trenches and is actually moving the hospitality needle independently, I’m always drawn back to a simple entrepreneurial truth: if you have the vision and chops to start a hotel, you can do anything.

When you first meet Dev Patel, founder and developer of Villa Mara, a new 16-room boutique hotel in Carmel Point on California’s Monterey Peninsula, it’s not hard to believe that he’s already pulled off what he’s pulled off by 35.

Patel’s quintessential demeanor is anti-preneur—the guy who can rock cuff links, a Rolex, and a monogrammed shirt under a custom suit in any meeting if he has to. But would always be more comfortable conquering the world in a pair of a jeans, t-shirt, and Air Jordans. His chill-chic, service-first, perfection-included vibe as a hotel founder also fits ideally with what everyone seems to want from travel post-pandemic. Stylistically, if Patel walked into my conference room selling any real estate project, I’d probably buy it.

Yet, at the same time, Patel’s got a bit of mama’s boy in him. He’s innately kind and observant with a natural instinct to anticipate people’s needs. His ability to bring them together in a way that forges long term bonds without forcing anyone to do anything is uncannily effortless.

All of these traits not surprisingly underpin Patel’s essential hospitality DNA—and, in aggregate, are no small reason why his first boutique hotel endeavor on his own, Villa Mara, is one of America’s best new small hotels.

Wedged into a residential overlook of historic homes, cypress trees, and impeccably manicured hydrangea and cactus gardens a block from Carmel’s postcard perfect beach, every essence of Villa Mara, which formally opened its doors in summer 2022, is about respecting context and blending in.

Despite all of the accolades and the plaques to go with them, the hotel is visually and kinetically indistinguishable from the other multi-million dollar homes that surround it—which is exactly the way Patel intended the comportment of Villa Mara to be in the first place.

In this way, Patel isn’t so much a hotel owner as he is an innkeeper in the purist sense of the word.

On most evenings when he’s in town fine tuning operations, you’ll usually find Patel taking guests on a walk along the beach or to the Pacific Ocean overlook up the street at sunset to marvel at the view.

He often carries a bottle of wine and four plastic glasses with him. If Patel gets caught up with his neighbors about which PGA tour pros are at Pebble Beach and when the next art gallery in town is opening up, the walk will take half an hour.

At night, Patel usually posts himself up around one of Villa Mara’s three fire pits, talking to guests and telling stories about Carmel’s past and his travels around the world. At the same time, he somehow manages to build a new “family” each night with an all-are-welcome, open-door policy that long ago went out the window with most brands when they turned their backs on community in favor of exclusivity.

“We wanted to make an undeniable case for casual, residential-style luxury,” says Patel of his original vision for Villa Mara.

“So, we designed everything about this place to keep things light and unpretentious, to invite the neighborhood in, as if all of our guests and staff have been friends for a decade, but haven’t seen each other in years. Connecting everyone on a personal level is our first priority, and we really lean into that. The mood of this place changes several times over the course of each day, every week, every month, and depending on the time of the year. That’s what makes Villa Mara what it is. I don’t like to use the word vibe. But we definitely have cultivated a soul.”

For the two nights that I had the chance to spend with Patel, “cultivated” was the word that he kept coming back to when we talked about makes a great hotel these days. Both of us are fairly well traveled and have been fortunate to stay at some pretty nice places. We both also have a decent sense of what makes hospitality buzzwords like cultivated actually meaningful or not.

In the broadest sense, to cultivate means “to nourish”. It also means to encourage, nurture, foster, advance, and push forward. And with Villa Mara it was precisely this more symbolic definition of the word that Patel wrapped his vision around—whether that applied to the hotel’s architecture, interior design, landscaping, gastronomy, wine, service culture, go-local sourcing, or creating a sense of community. Everything about Villa Mara from the beginning, recalls Patel, would be about pushing the essential elements of hospitality forward.

“If you don’t nourish and advance at the same time, what’s the point of starting a hotel in the first place except just keeping someone out of the rain?”

Not surprisingly, a big part of the innate hospitality IQ that Patel’s advancing is rooted in pedigree.

Patel grew up in the hotel business. By the time most kids were just learning how to kick a soccer ball, he was already flipping rooms in his parents’ motel which they bought in Roseburg, Oregon south of Portland back in 1991.

“I saw my parents work around the clock putting heads in beds as far back as I can remember,” Patel tells me as he pours a glass of rare Pinot Noir for us by the main fire pit in the back of Villa Mara. “They got my older brother and I involved in the hotel business from the start and it’s been a part of our lives ever since.”

While sharing the small manager’s unit with his parents—which sounds a lot like a set ripped from Netflix’s hit series “Schitt’s Creek”—those early years gave Patel a degree in hospitality that only real life can dish out.

“My brother and I learned the ins and outs of the hotel business from our parents. But we also learned about business in general,” Patel recalls. “In 1995, they started building their own hotel from the ground up and left my brother and I alone to watch over the motel they’d bought. I sold my first room at seven years old swiping an American Express card on a manual credit card imprinter. Can you imagine what that guest must have thought seeing me behind the front desk checking them in?! My parents also ran the construction company building the new hotel. So my brother and I were always around the business with our parents going to the bank, the hardware store, or negotiating with subcontractors.”

Along with learning how to run a hotel in those early years, Patel also got a ground floor education in what hoteliers now fancifully like to call the “guest experience”.

Back when his parents bought their first motel, it was just called “service”, recalls Patel. It was the other word that he kept coming back to when I pressed him on what made Villa Mara unique. Every hotel talks about how they have the best service. Yet, no one’s ever really come up with a clear definition of what that means.

“Hospitality needs to come from the heart and boils down to really caring about someone—whether they are with you for a couple minutes or a lifetime,” says Patel. “When you really start to care about something or someone, you begin to understand what kinds of things can change their day or make them happy or feel appreciated. If you care, you pay attention to everything.”

Patel’s parents also taught him that exceptional service isn’t a part-time job. You can’t “care” for people and make them feel appreciated only when it suits your schedule or when you feel like it.

“My parents worked 24 hours a day in their hotels,” Patel remembers. “If someone rang the night bell, one of them would wake up out of bed and sell a room or tend to a guest. They also treated our employees as if they were family. My parents never took anyone or anything for granted. They came from a mindset of survival, and they thrived in that space.”

Though Patel would never describe Villa Mara’s service culture this way, his own approach to hospitality is also karmic. That means you always do the right thing, says Patel. “You figure out how to make a French Negroni with Campari if a guest asks for one after hiking in Big Sur all day. It means that you don’t nickel and dime for minibar snacks. If you pay-it-forward, guests will come back.”

So, when it came to finally developing his own first hotel, Patel had a lot of experience to draw from—as well as local knowledge.

“I had been living on the Monterey Peninsula for about 10 years, and I always knew about this old hotel that sat out in this incredible Carmel Point neighborhood a block off the beach,” he recalls, referring to Villa Mara back when it was called Sandpiper Inn under its previous owner.

“It was never marketed to the public and we acquired it very quietly, as most great things are. Once I had it, I didn’t know what it could be. But it was incredible real estate. Then, I got a chance to spend more time inside the property and on the grounds, my wheels started to spin, and they haven’t stopped since. During Covid when the world stopped, I stayed there for two weeks alone and I knew from that point on that I wanted this to be a space where people would get together, get to know one another once again, and strangers would become friends.”

For remodeling inspiration for the 1929 era property, Patel took cues from other compounds in the Mediterranean, estates in the Hamptons, and his favorite boutique hotels. Incorporating similar design elements into his project, he wagered, would pay homage to California’s upscale coastal vibe all while respecting the hotel’s place within its historic Carmel-By-The-Sea neighborhood.

A few months later, Patel found himself involved in every aspect of Villa Mara’s renovation. He helped rip out floors and windows and scoured the planet for tile, fixtures, and furnishings. With his interior designer, he obsessed over the hotel’s color palette of driftwood, agave, alabaster, and rosemary, and the custom textural details like the metal and leather wrapped banisters going upstairs to the second floor.

“There wasn’t a part of the project that I didn’t have my hands on,” Patel recalls. “I slept in all the sheets, sampled all the towels and robes, and spent hours in stone yards, nurseries, and lumber yards. Every time I walked into our designer’s office, the first thing I would say is: “If it feels like a hotel, then we fail.”

Patel’s vision for Villa Mara also meant preserving the property’s neighborhood essence while harmoniously bringing in all of the thoughtful touches of a high-end resort—or as Patel describes it, “staying true to his residential-inspired vision with all the accoutrements of a luxury hotel.”

The resulting views from Villa Mara’s rooms on both the first and second floors are thoughtfully designed to make you feel like you’re staying at a best friend’s beach house, including expansive divided light windows and porches, terraces, and outdoor seating areas where guests can watch the clouds turn red as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean and let the salt air and sound of the waves in at night.

Every room at Villa Mara is also designed to celebrate Carmel’s natural sense of place, so each is named after a famous local artist, resident, or historic landmark. Inside, bespoke details like textured wallpaper, custom furniture, colorful fabric headboards as well as luxuries like heated bathroom floors, waterfall showerheads, and soaking tubs are unique to every room.

On the ground floor—where all of the chaos in a typical resort usually gets funneled—Patel also stayed true to his vision of Villa Mara as a home not a hotel. There’s no formal lobby or front desk. There are no signs outside or inside telling you where you are or where to go. The casualness works perfectly. You check-in in a living room, grab a coffee or a drink from Villa Mara’s bar, and settle right in.

Outside, Villa Mara’s landscaping was also designed by Patel to achieve a similarly subtle sense of spontaneity.

“On the exterior of the property, I wanted to create a lot of small vignettes for our guests to escape to since the climate in Carmel is near perfect and we’re known for over year-round indoor-outdoor lifestyle,” he explains. “I wanted a big main fire that guests could gather around, and water features that would anchor distinct outdoor living room areas.”

Given Villa Mara’s location, it was also essential for Patel to navigate what could have been NIMBYism (“not in my back yard”) against any hotel in an upscale neighborhood.

“I wanted to make the neighborhood proud,” recalls Patel of avoiding any potential blow back, especially during construction. “But during Covid, knocking on people’s doors wasn’t ideal. So, I’d walk the neighbors through the project at all stages from the outside so they could see the transformation and the effort that we were putting in. Once it was safe, I must have personally walked hundreds of people through the inside.”

The result, says Patel, is now near unanimous support for what Villa Mara has added to the neighborhood.

“We now constantly get neighbors coming in and giving us compliments on the hotel and we often house their guests and overflow family when they’re in town for holidays. This neighborhood has so many iconic homes and the fact that we’ve pulled off ‘fitting in’ without disrupting the character of the community is one of the things we’re most proud of.”

For guests who do for some reason end up getting a bug to leave Villa Mara’s personal, private oasis, Carmel’s downtown—world-renowned for its art galleries, restaurants, wineries, and local, independently owned retailers—is just a mile away. Pebble Beach Golf Club is a few more inutes north up the coast. Villa Mara’s concierge team can also suggest a host of local activities and hidden gems to visit.

“We know all the hikes, all the restaurants, all the little secrets,” Patel says of his team’s local knowledge. “We make sure that you’re seeing the sunset at just the right spot and at just the right time.”

As for Patel’s hospitality future now that he has one award winning hotel under his belt?

“Slow and steady,” he says, like a mantra. “Get the first one right. Then make the next one even better.”

Villa Mara is open to guests 21 and older. You can book your stay here.