Hotel Stories: Simon Tichelaar, The Refinery Hotel

A building with memory

The Refinery Hotel occupies a 1912 building on 38th Street that served as home to New York's hat-making industry for decades. A tearoom opened on the ground floor in the same era. The building's industrial bones are still visible: 12-foot ceilings, factory windows, distressed hardwood floors. The vintage sewing machine details worked into the furniture were not invented for atmosphere — they were borrowed from the building's actual history.

Simon Tichelaar, Director of Guest Relations, works within that history every day. His job is to translate what the building carries into what guests actually experience, from the first impression at the lobby to the detail they notice on the way out.

Watch the full feature: Simon Tichelaar, The Refinery Hotel — Innspire Hotel Stories

The craft of making people feel at home

Guest relations in a hotel of this kind is not primarily a logistics role. It is a listening role. Simon's work involves understanding what each guest has come for, what this particular building can offer that they would not find somewhere else, and making sure the operational layer stays quiet enough that the experience can speak for itself.

The Refinery's character does a lot of the work: the rooftop bar with its Empire State Building views, Parker & Quinn's dining room, Winnie's lobby bar with its live jazz programme. Simon's role is to make sure guests find their way to the right corners of the hotel, and that the team who look after them know what is expected.

The unsung work

Innspire's Hotel Stories series is not only about General Managers. It is about the people at every level who decide what hospitality means in practice — the ones guests rarely think to name but always remember. Simon Tichelaar is that person at The Refinery: someone who knows the building, knows the guests, and has made a career out of knowing which moments need a system and which need a person.

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