Welcome to the Hypebeast Hotel

Take your pick of reasons why traditional retail is struggling. Stores don't offer the same comfort as your couch. They can be out of the way and filled with people you don’t feel like talking to, or maybe they're too crowded, noisy, or inaccessible. So stores are changing. Today’s retailers, like a needy friend, want more of your time than ever: they beg you to come over and play basketball, relax and sip a coffee or, if you’d like, why don’t you stay for supper? The tees on the table are available to buy, but increasingly, so is the table, and the rug you’re standing on. You like the art on the wall? Please, it’s yours. (For a price.) The next wave of retail wants—needs!—to take the customer-store relationship to the next level.

Now, that means building out full apartments to go along with a storefront so customers can spend the night. That’s what’s on offer from a new store in Washington D.C. from four-year-old Atlanta-based retailer A Ma Maniére, which offers three floors of shopping—and, directly next door to racks of Raf Simons, Off-White, and Fear of God, rooms that customers can rent out. A Ma Maniére wants to sell space like it’s an item from one of those hyped designers.

The A Ma Maniére “Living” concept is divided into two suites—one with a more muted and “sophisticated” color palette, the other filled with more colorful and playful elements—designed to make a certain sort of Raf Simons-worshipping, Supreme box logo-wearing individual feel at home. (Or, you know, the home they want to have, once they move out of their parents’ place.) The project asks the question: if you love a store so much—what it sells, the people who work there, what it looks like—wouldn’t you want to live there, too? “People want to stay or live in their favorite store because it's already an extension of what their life is becoming,” James Whitner, A Ma Maniére’s owner and founder, told me.

In the A Ma Maniére living spaces, hypebeast taste is atomized down to the glass containers on the kitchen counter filled with Jolly Ranchers—the candy of choice for lean-guzzling rappers. Medicom bear toys stand guard around the apartment, on top of pillars or nestled alongside luxe Sodastreams. Basketballs hanging from the ceiling are carved out and filled with plants. At least in the more sophisticated space, everything—the rug, the Snarkitecture-designed coffee table, the planter, the entertainment center, the pedestals for Medicom toys, the couch topped with pillows—is grey, the better to ‘Gram against.“I'm very, very inspired by Paris,” Whitner says of the design.

The concept is an acknowledgment that retailers can no longer afford to be solely in the business of selling clothes. Now, they need to sell fully-formed lifestyles. “Fuck selling anything,” Whitner says. “Retail is experience-first now. Shit, I don't even know if consumption is second. We are all shopping online so when you come to retail sometimes it's just vibes.” He adds, “I have to sell experience, I have to sell the vibes, I have to sell a lifestyle, I have to sell a smell, I have to sell a whole feeling.” And a furnished apartment is a pretty compelling way to sell a feeling: customers can immerse themselves in the lifestyle they imagine living when they buy the retailer’s designer clothes.

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And in a fashion era driven so much by what we post, half of living the lifestyle is actually getting evidence onto the ‘Gram—A Ma Maniére’s done the work of vibes curation for customers looking for the perfect canvas. The drab living space is the perfect backdrop for a sort of customer who posts their “‘fits”—it’s always a ‘fit. A Ma Maniére has created a one-stop shop for them to buy the clothes then walk over to their suite, up the stairs and past the neon sign that reads #ifyouknowyouknow, then take a picture that will convey that they are the kind of influencer-grade customer who posts shots of sneakers in front of gnomic neon signs. It’s a sort of streetwear ouroboros. Whitner says that, personally, he isn’t into the manipulation game people play on Instagram, but with these spaces “it's going to 100 percent happen—we can't stop that.”

Whitner hopes the space will result in increased sales, too. Inside each A Ma Maniére suite, a closet will be personalized for each guest. When a customer makes a reservation, the booking site will also grab their favorite designers, their sizes, even a link to their Instagram. The closet will then be filled “like a mini bar,” Whitner says, inside a traditional hotel with shoppable clothes from A Ma Maniére that visitors can try on inside their glorified dressing room—and then buy.

The A Ma Maniére Living spaces are an experiment in not just selling clothes, but applying the logic of sneaker sales—currently a $19.6 billion dollar industry—to the hospitality business. Whitner says his goal is to have suites “booked out for a year straight,” and sounds like a Nike or Adidas executive when he describes his strategy for making that happen.

The suites are booked out for friends and family for the first 60 days, and the rollout to the general public will be carefully orchestrated. At first, only five days will open up. “If we don't sell out five days in a couple minutes, we'll pull them down,” Whitner says. Like a sneaker company generating hype for a new drop, Whitner plans on suppressing supply to increase demand. He’ll open up blocks slowly—as long as “they sell out instantaneously,” he says.

The retail commodification of spaces isn’t an entirely new idea. Basics brand Marine Layer builds out Airbnbs over some of its stores for customers who want a California-inspired beach hideaway wherever they go. Chip and Joanna Gaines, hosts of the HGTV show Fixer Upper, rent out spaces they’ve renovated that are booked by customers who want to experience the shiplap for themselves. Logic dictates that customers spending billions of dollars on sneakers will also want a room specifically designed for them. A Ma Maniére’s spaces only feel different than Chip and Jo’s because of the sort of customer they’re designed for, but hypebeasts need places to stay too.

A Ma Maniére aims to create something so hyped that it sells out not because there are toys or basketballs stuffed with greenery, or perfectly gray environments, but because of just pure raw desire. The same factors that make people turn out in droves in hopes of buying “ugly” Balenciaga Triple S sneakers or Yeezys. A Ma Maniére wants to create a living space you can Instagram like a hot shoe—inspiring envy in followers simply because against all odds you somehow clicked through the site quickly enough to snag a reservation. This strategy works wonders in the sneaker market where the aforementioned shoes are hyped up on Instagram by celebrities and influencers. That sort of Instagram hype can dictate what’s hot and Whitner hopes he can make his space feel as limited-edition as the shoes he sells.