NYC Hospitality Innovator Sponsored By Heineken: The Wythe Hotel's Peter Lawrence, Encouraging Us To Wake Up In Williamsburg

Tell me about your background. “I grew up in Australia in kind of a strange place in Canberra which is the capital of the country. It was a completely designed city. There was nothing there and an American architect came and designed the whole place so its very beautiful and very sterile, or at least it was when I was growing up. Then I ran to Melbourne after high school and I worked in sort of fancy hotels there. I went to go and be a photographer but I had to make my way through school. (Editor’s note: His wife is a professional photographer -“She wears that hat in our family now.”) I did that for a while and then started running great big nightclubs – which is great when you’re 23, not so great 5 years later. So I came to New York (in 1994) to sort of draw a line and stop doing that."