Dive Motel
Throw your memory back a little, straight to 1980, until you reach that film directed by James Bridges in which John Travolta was a full-fledged city cowboy. Urban Cowboy and the protagonist of Saturday night Fever put on the cinematic map Gilley's Club, world's biggest honky tonk Pasadena, Texas . Those ballroom dances and Tejano aesthetics laid the groundwork that inspired Lyon Porter and Jersey Banks to open, in 2014, a hotel/house in Brooklyn under the name of, of course, Urban Cowboy.
"It was a project driven by passion. We just decided to do our dream house ... and we ended up opening it to the world. It was also a very special time in Brooklyn back then," explains Lyon Porter, the hotelier who now has four lodgings, as well as a professional past in the world of hockey and as one of the best residential brokers in New York. " Williamsburg it was always my home and the area where the house is located was still a place that no one had 'discovered'," he explains.
Four bedrooms make up the main house, with rooms for rent for their "creative residents" , regular and long-term guests. More than a hotel Urban Cowboy is a hotel where you can relax , talk and make life with the other residents. Currently and for the duration of COVID-19, it is the primary residence for Lyon and Jersey, leaving an attached casita available for photo shoots only. Although until very recently all kinds of travelers passed through his living room, ready to listen vinyls with strangers and spend a night drinking craft beers or Negronis that the hostess (and also guest) prepared for everyone after a session of sauna or jacuzzi in the backyard.
"Urban Cowboy, in Brooklyn, is a place conceived to create a community Porter explains. meet new friends ... create a home away from home that was intimate. A haven within a massive city," he confesses.
Right after that came the Urban Cowboy replica in Nashville. "Everyone who came to Brooklyn told us 'you have to open one of these in the city.' So we caught a plane, found a building within the hour...and the rest was magic," he tells us. In Brooklyn, they devised a bed and breakfast rustic luxury while in Nashville They set out to get a Boutique hotel with two bars open to the public.
Once the scenario was known, The Dive Motel arrived in 2019, a curious and attractive renovated roadside motel and put as an aesthetic sensation that knows how to appeal to the eye of Instagram . "We have one romantic nostalgia for motels . Classics yes, but also sexy and even ugly... it depends on the generation you are, you have a different vision", jokes Porter of an accommodation –located 5 minutes from the Downtown of the city– in which a club and a lounge welcome right across from where check-in takes place.
The building that he housed a motel in the 50s now covered in seventies glory in 23 rooms uniquely designed: as in the Leopard , covered from head to toe with printed velvet; the rumors , a dream tinted pink; wave Honeymoon , with two bathtubs next to the bed. All of them with a "party switch" and disco balls , as well as access to the hotel pool and Jacuzzi. In Public House , one of the hotel bars, Natalie Jacob cocktails are served and, very soon, it will be the pizzas of the New York restaurant Roberta's those that make a star appearance on their tables.
All of this comes after Porter and Banks decided to open their third Urban Cowboy, this time as a lodge and aiming higher and further north than New York, in the Catskills. "It's a lodge that is mentally gold-plated, in the middle of nature and mountains. Something completely different from our other properties, which makes it more interesting for us. It's a place where you can light the fireplace, drink hot whiskeys, with two rivers, no phone connection... and a multitude of stars to admire at night".
Jersey Banks and Lyon Porter.