When legacy brands exit and tech founders move in
What the $82M sale of El Encanto tells us about new boutique hotel power players.
It’s not every day that a group like LVMH parts ways with a five-star hotel—a classic one at that. And it’s even rarer when the new buyer happens to be a man best known for launching Tinder.
This month, El Encanto, the much-loved Santa Barbara property under the Belmond brand, changed hands for $82 million. The buyer is Justin Mateen, Tinder’s co-founder, who’s now staking his claim in the world of luxury hospitality.
The sale raises more questions than it answers.
Why is LVMH offloading its only US hotel at a time when American luxury travel is booming? And more pressingly, why is a tech mogul—whose past is peppered with scandal—wanting to put another $40 million into a renovation?
Heritage and disruption are apparently blurring, and this deal feels like more than just a change of ownership. Legacy brands are pulling back, and rogue outsiders, armed with private capital and something to prove, are moving in. And they’re doing so with taste, not scale, in mind.
When LVMH acquired Belmond back in 2019, it inherited a pretty neat collection of hotels, each one maintaining a romantic vision of hospitality. You know, timeless, tasteful… all the things we love here.
El Encanto, perched in the hills above Santa Barbara, was a part of that promise—an arts-and-crafts-era property with grand Pacific vistas and old-world glamour.
So why let it go?
LVMH offered no dramatic exit memo. That’s not their style. But the signs are there.
In recent years, the group’s hospitality strategy has taken on a different tone. The future is branded… Bvlgari branded.
From Miami Beach to Tokyo, LVMH is building hospitality around sleek glass towers and heavy marble lobbies—a level of visual excess that aligns more naturally with stuffy fashion maisons and fragrance lines.
By contrast, the Belmond identity is a touch more analog. It’s understated, very much European in its sensibility, which could be why it’s resistant to the more on-the-nose luxury design notes that seem to define LVMH’s spaces.
There’s also the harder financial calculus. Owning and operating a single US property, especially in a heavily regulated coastal market like Santa Barbara, might have felt too niche, too local or simply too slow to scale.
In a portfolio that favours turnkey expansion, El Encanto likely became an anomaly. Beautiful yes. Beloved, even! But not essential.
If LVMH’s move was all hush hush, Justin Mateen’s was anything but.
This is a man whose reputation oscillates somewhere between enigmatic and notorious, and he moved in swiftly with his acquisition. No third-party operators and no brand tie-ins needed, meaning the hotel is now no longer associated with Belmond. They’ve already taken El Encanto off their press portal—a clean break.
It’s an odd inversion of the usual hospitality playbook. Most investors enter the industry to make the most of brand systems already in place. Think Four Seasons, Auberge, Aman, etc. But Mateen seems to be doing the opposite. He’s opting for total control, and with that, a chance to chip away at a space without the shadow of corporate taste.
On paper, it’s a risky bet. Paying nearly $900,000 per key is aggressive, even for coastal California. The planned renovation, rumoured to include a private club, a ‘mystical’ garden and coffee shop, reads more like a passion project than anything else.
But I suppose passion, for this type of investor, is crucial.
As tech founders age out of venture-backed chaos, many pivot towards lifestyle. And for Mateen, El Encanto becomes a chance to reset his image from tech bro to a more refined cultural stakeholder.
He’s not alone. Larry Ellison of Oracle has Lanai. And Marc Lore of Wonder Group is off building some utopian city. These ventures are essentially legacy statements.
But here’s where it gets interesting. If LVMH’s strategy is purely business, and Mateen’s is more about personal expression (or so I’ve gone ahead and assumed), then El Encanto becomes something of a mirror.
Hotels require taste and intent. They’re shaped by whatever the owner values most, whether that’s scale or intimacy, consistency or conviction, image or influence. And how someone owns a hotel, i.e. what they do with it and how they decide to position it, tells us what we need to know about them.
That’s where the real difference is between LVMH and Mateen. For the former, it was about returns. For the latter, it’s about imprint.
The move strains logic. But to someone playing the long game, especially one with private capital, it makes perfect sense. He can do whatever he wants.
Besides, Santa Barbara doesn’t court press in the same way other spots might. Wealth here is arguably more entrenched, so the clientele isn’t looking for the next big opening; they’re simply returning to what they already know and love.
Hopefully, Mateen doesn’t ruin that.
I’ll give it to him, though. For too long, ultra-luxury hospitality has revolved around affiliation. But that model is beginning to fray. The most gripping manoeuvres in high-end travel today aren’t being led by conglomerates—they’re being led by people like Mateen, whose motivations may be unclear, but whose actions signal a new way of doing things in this space.
The new power players aren’t always hoteliers by trade. They’re those with deep pockets and a desire to project identity through a space. And honestly, influence in hospitality, isn’t always about moral clarity. It’s about who has the care and commitment to make something stick.
Whether Mateen has that care and commitment remains to be seen. But the acquisition sends a strong message.
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