How & why ENJOIE is expanding from hospitality to real estate development

Over the past few months, many people have asked what is happening with ENJOIE and The Farmhouse. We have indeed been going through a pivot.

ENJOIE started with a feeling: simply put, I wasn’t enjoying life anymore.

By your forties and fifties, much of life has been shaped by decisions made decades earlier. Careers are established and, although hopefully financially rewarding, intellectually they often become less so. You are repeating rather than learning new things the way you did in your twenties and thirties. You acquire more and more things and develop routines. And somewhere along the way, it can become clear that those things — and even your career — are partly ego: a beautiful box without much happiness inside.

They call it a midlife crisis…

ENJOIE — a mashup of the English enjoy and the French joie de vivre — came from an attempt to reconnect with that feeling of happiness. It became a multi-year journey of trial and error that ultimately led to the understanding that it was about living differently: being active, spending time outdoors, bringing people together, moving between cultures and surrounding ourselves with fewer things that we value more.

For us, it began with renovating a 200-year-old farmhouse in the French Alps.

The Farmhouse became the physical expression of ENJOIE. And because we felt incredibly fortunate to have it, we wanted to share it. That is how ENJOIE gradually became a hospitality business.

For a while — especially after Covid — that made perfect sense. But over time, we encountered a contradiction between who we wanted to be and where the market was pushing us.

We wanted less, but better. Hospitality economics — and the booking apps that initially disrupted the market but gradually became part of the problem — increasingly demanded more, for less.

More occupancy. More turnover. More content. More availability. More standardization. Lower operating costs.

Eventually, the numbers caught up with us. We weren’t simply accepting a lower return because we loved The Farmhouse; we were subsidizing the hospitality business financially and energetically, with our time and with the complexity of operating a European property while living in the United States.

In my previous professional life, I was trained to think and look at things outside the box. And I did. I came to an observation: maybe The Farmhouse wasn’t meant to be the business. Maybe it was the prototype for a product. Hospitality is usually a service. What if we made it a product?

The most valuable thing we had created wasn’t a hospitality operation. It was the place itself — a home that is authentic rather than perfect, designed around living rather than display, connected to its surroundings, built with materials that age well and capable of bringing people together.

That realization is taking ENJOIE from hospitality into real estate development: from sharing one place we created to creating places for others.

We create homes people don’t need, but deeply want.

Going forward, we want to shift our focus to the design and development of second homes and lifestyle-driven residential properties. Homes to enjoy and to share. #residentialhospitality

Places people look forward to going to. Places to reconnect with themselves and with each other. To cook, gather, entertain, retreat, recharge and spend time with family and friends.

Residential hospitality is not commercial hospitality. It is a way of thinking about how a home is designed and functions: around enjoyment, gathering, retreat and ease of living.

We are a developer first, contractor second.

That is also why I went back to school, trained in construction and became a licensed California General Building Contractor. Not because ENJOIE should become another contracting company, but because if we take responsibility for transforming a property, we should understand and control how it actually gets built.

After more than 20 years in banking, corporate finance, M&A and real estate finance, I don’t stop thinking about capital because I am standing on a construction site. Every project has a financial reality. But financial return is only one form of return. There is also functional return and emotional return. A home has to make financial sense, but ultimately somebody has to love living there.

And The Farmhouse will travel with us through the European materials and craftsmanship we bring to the US.

Wood. Stone. Plaster. Glass. Metal. Tile. Cabinetry.

Materials that are allowed to age and architectural elements made by people who still understand permanence. Over the years we have developed relationships with European craftspeople, fabricators and manufacturers to bring that knowledge and those products into the homes we create.

And The Farmhouse isn’t going anywhere.

We will continue hosting, but without forcing it to become something it was never meant to be. It will remain our flagship, our laboratory and the place that taught us what we were actually trying to create.