A Different Way of Seeing Hospitality

Elke Bretz · Founder of azulomo · Creator of Slow Living Hospitality™

I’m Elke Bretz, founder of azulomo and creator of Slow Living Hospitality™, a more considered approach to creating stays that people value, remember and choose.

My route into hospitality hasn’t been a conventional one.

For more than two decades, my work has centred around experience design, digital behaviour and consumer psychology. I founded and built a design agency, worked across hundreds of digital projects and spent years fascinated by what draws people in, what creates trust and desire, and why some experiences simply feel more meaningful and valuable than others.

Because choice is rarely as rational as we imagine. Why can two experiences that look almost identical on paper make us feel completely differently? Why does one capture our attention while another passes us by? And what creates that almost instinctive moment when we think, yes, this is for me?

Travel made me start asking those same questions about hospitality. I have always loved discovering places. Not simply beautiful hotels, but tiny guesthouses, family-run restaurants, homes, villages, landscapes and those wonderful places you stumble across almost by accident and find yourself talking about years later.

And the more I explored, the more I noticed something. The places I remembered most weren't necessarily the ones that offered the most. They were the ones that made me feel something.

Over time, and through some of the bigger changes in my own life, I came to understand travel differently too. It wasn't simply about seeing somewhere new. Sometimes we travel because we need distance from everyday life. Sometimes we need rest, perspective, connection, freedom, beauty or simply the space to feel like ourselves again.

A place can give us that.

It can change our pace. Shift our perspective. Bring us back to people we love. That made me look at hospitality differently.

Because perhaps what we are really creating isn't simply somewhere to stay. We are creating the conditions for something to happen in someone’s life, however small that something might be.

That idea has stayed with me.

Interiors have always been part of my fascination with place. I’ve designed and re-styled homes influenced by country living, Balinese and the Mediterranean style, studied with Three Birds Renovations and Natalie Walton and, in doing so I have been inspired by a more intentional approach to home and slow living. The countryside barn my husband, Craig, and I re-styled, later featured on BBC’s Escape to the Country, reinforced something travel had already taught me: How a place feels is rarely accidental.

And over the years I became increasingly interested in everything beyond the interior.

The soul of a place isn't created by styling alone. It lives in how the space belongs to its surroundings, the people behind it, what you hear when you open a window, what happens around the table, the places nearby that someone cared enough to tell you about, and all those small, almost invisible decisions that make an experience feel considered rather than ‘manufactured’.

And somewhere between my professional world of experience design and this much more personal fascination with travel, place and how we live, azulomo began to take shape.

Why I created azulomo

I felt hospitality was becoming very good at giving people more, while some of the places that meant the most to me had taught me the value of something else entirely. Clarity. Character. Connection. Quiet. A sense of place. The feeling that somebody had understood why you might want to be there. I began to wonder what hospitality might look like if we took those things as seriously as amenities, occupancy and technology.

That question became Slow Living Hospitality™.

It isn't a particular aesthetic, nor is it simply an idea about slowing down. It is a hospitality and business philosophy built on the belief that creating greater commercial value begins with understanding human value more deeply. Because how guests feel isn't separate from how hospitality businesses perform.

Emotion influences desire.
Relevance influences choice.
Trust influences conversion.
Distinctiveness influences perceived value.
Memory influences recommendation and return.

The things we sometimes describe as the soft side of hospitality can have very real commercial consequences.

That is where my experience-design background and my love of hospitality finally came together.

I began to see that the questions I had spent years asking about human behaviour were just as relevant to a small guesthouse, holiday home or a boutique hotel. But I also believed hospitality deserved something more human than another formula for optimisation.

For me, the opportunity is to understand the guest, the place and the business as one connected experience.

To create places with enough identity to stand for something. Enough understanding of their guests to know what really matters to them. Enough confidence not to add simply for the sake of adding. And enough commercial intelligence to turn those decisions into stronger, more distinctive businesses.

Human feeling and commercial intelligence belong in the same conversation.

That belief sits underneath everything I am building at azulomo.

Through Slow Living Hospitality™, my Founder Essays, SLOW / an azulomo journal, ongoing research and The Slow Living Hosting Masterclass™, I want to contribute a more thoughtful way of looking at independent hospitality. One that takes emotion seriously, understands the value of identity and place, and never forgets the human being on the other side of the booking.

Because after more than two decades in experience design, years of travelling, creating homes and collecting memories of places around the world, I keep returning to the same thought:

The places we remember aren't always the places that gave us the most.

They are often the places that understood what mattered.

And I believe that could change the way we think about hospitality.

Elke Bretz
Founder, azulomo
Creator of Slow Living Hospitality™