“This is the radio station,” Katherine Lo tells me, gesturing to an unfinished space nestled beneath a staircase. The setup, she says, is inspired by East Village Radio, the radical New York City broadcaster. “Here’s the DJ booth, and then a huge collection of vinyl records will go over there.”
It’s a chilly but bright late-spring afternoon, and I’m touring the construction site for Eaton DC in the nation's capital. It’s easy to forget that we’re standing in what will open in a few months as a hip lifestyle hotel with 209 rooms. Forty-five minutes into our walk-through and Lo, Eaton’s 36-year-old founder and president, whose father is executive chairman of the Langham Hospitality Group, still hasn’t mentioned where the guests will sleep. Just a few blocks to the south is the Trump International, where coal mining industry lobbyists met genially with energy secretary Rick Perry last year.
Eaton DC, which is the first of a number of such venues planned for Hong Kong, Seattle, and San Francisco, will be part hotel, part co-working space, part amorphous center for progressive causes. Artist residencies will allow creatives to stay at Eaton free of charge; conference spaces and a movie theater will be offered at a discount to sympathetic groups of organizers and activists. Lo recently spent a day with members of a Standing Rock Youth Water Protectors collective, who were crammed into a small D.C. house; they are the kind of people that she hopes to help. The radio station will air a radical indigenous-rights show called Red Power Hour, and the rooftop will house an urban farm that will provide ingredients for the restaurant below, American Son. It also provides space for a small wind turbine—a “symbolic gesture,” Lo explains, capable only of powering an exercise bike in the gym, she jokes. “I thought we said a pasta machine!” her project manager replies.
It’s tempting to dismiss the hotelier as part of an activist movement more concerned with aesthetics than with actual change. When the Eaton concept was first announced in 2017, media focused on its offerings of reiki spa treatments and sustainable cocktails.
But Lo, who goes by Kat, doesn’t exude the bravado of a disrupter selling, well, a wind turbine–powered pasta machine. She is soft-spoken and meticulously polite, with the careful articulation of someone who spent her childhood in international schools in Hong Kong. As a college student at Yale, I learn in one of our first conversations, she was the center of a controversy on campus after she hung an American flag upside down from her dorm room window in protest of the Iraq War. She demures when I remind her that another daughter of a hotel magnate, Ivanka Trump, recently (and dubiously) claimed she once had a “punk phase”—while Lo actually did, complete with a shaved head. “I was so young,” she laughs.
After graduation, she helped organize Korean farmworkers traveling to Hong Kong to protest the WTO, then began working in film in Hong Kong. Eventually she got a master’s in film production from USC before finally joining the family business. It was a career change that mirrored her father's own move from his medical practice in Michigan (both her parents are doctors) to working for Great Eagle, the family corporation. With her ombré hair and relaxed yet elevated wardrobe—Rachel Comey, A Déta-cher, Nanushka—Lo looks more like a Venice Beach cool girl than a corporate hotel magnate. Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU who was an early supporter of Eaton, calls Lo “an activist with style.” Still, she maintains a private Instagram account: a rarity in a world where female business owners—or dreaded “She-EOs”—are often expected to post as much as work.
She has also disarmed skeptics wary of the resistance-as-branding strategy that has swept through so many industries—from T-shirts to tampons—since the 2016 election. “Corporations, hotels, and developers, they come in and bring in artists for very ornamental positions,” says Sheldon Scott, a D.C.-based artist who is Eaton DC’s director of culture and who will man its programming. “As a black man,” Scott says, “I’ve always been challenged on how I enter, why I enter hotel spaces.” Lo offered him time and square footage, ever-dwindling commodities in gentrifying cities.
If the idea of a private company actively courting those who share its ideology sounds vaguely discriminatory, Lo doesn’t mind. “The brand is an extension of my values, and we don’t shy away from that,” she says. Part of the gamble is that customers will actually prefer Eaton’s radically transparent partisanship. “It’s attractive to guests who want to feel like their dollars make a difference,” Lo says. “If you’re a guest at Eaton, you’re a patron of arts and activism.” Lo is accordingly seeking B Corp certification, which indicates a for-profit company has some nonprofit-like aspirations and demonstrates “rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.” (Companies like Patagonia and Kickstarter have received this designation.) She’s also working toward LEED certification, a green status.
Lo acknowledges that she’s liberated from certain financial pressures—venture capitalists or investors looking for a return—by virtue of her family’s involvement. But there’s still that nagging question: Will it work? On the day we part, the city is full of teenagers carrying handmade signs demanding better gun control. Lo expresses her regret that her hotel isn’t yet equipped to host these activists and their supporters. Additional protest in the capital, I reassure her, is something she can count on.
