Two Harvard classmates, a Springfield hotel and a sign too costly to change.

Sheraton began with two Harvard classmates, Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore, who had not set out to run hotels. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its profile of ITT Sheraton Corporation, says the pair tried many businesses before turning to securities after the stock market crash, buying a run of investment companies with Henderson’s brother George. They chose hotels, the Directory says, because they believed real estate, and hotels in particular, would recover quickly after the Depression, and they built the business by buying struggling properties and turning them around.

The first purchase, around 1933, was the Continental in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1937, English Wikipedia says, Henderson and Moore combined the Standard Investing Corporation and the International Equities Corporation into the Standard Equities Corporation, and bought the Stonehaven Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, a converted apartment building. The company dates its founding to 1937 and treats the Springfield property as its first hotel.

The name arrived two years later and almost by accident. A building at 91 Bay State Road in Boston had opened in 1923 as the Sheraton Apartment Hotel, and BU Today, the Boston University news site, reported in 2012 that its developers probably chose the name to evoke the furniture style of the English designer Thomas Sheraton; the building itself had Federal-period, neoclassical touches. Henderson and partners bought it in 1939. The same article quotes a passage from Henderson’s autobiography explaining what happened next: the hotel had an expensive electric roof sign, which “left us little choice in selecting the name for our future domain”, because changing its letters would have cost a small fortune. Their hotels in Springfield and Washington became Sheraton hotels, and the company took the name too.

The Directory tells the same story in its own words, saying the sign bore the words “Sheraton Hotel” and would have been prohibitively costly to replace. The Bay State Road building later passed to Boston University, which used it as a residence hall under several names.

From Standard Equities to ITT, Starwood and Marriott.

Through the 1940s the company kept buying. The Directory says it acquired the Copley Plaza in Boston within a few years of the Sheraton building, and then hotels along the East Coast from Maine to Florida. In 1946 Standard Equities merged with the United States Realty and Improvement Company, and the combined business was soon renamed the Sheraton Corporation of America. Wikipedia says its shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1947.

Expansion abroad followed. The Directory dates the move into Canada to 1949 and the purchase of hotels in Hawaii to 1959, followed by a project in Tel Aviv in 1961 and, in 1963, the Macuto Sheraton in Venezuela. From the late 1950s the company also built new hotels and motor inns rather than only buying old ones, and in 1962 it formed a franchise division, which let other owners use the Sheraton name with its reservation system.

Ernest Henderson died in 1967, the Directory records, and the chain passed to his son, Ernest Henderson III. In 1968 the conglomerate International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) acquired Sheraton as a wholly owned subsidiary. The Directory says ITT’s president, Harold Geneen, attached the ITT name to its subsidiaries, and Wikipedia dates the formal rebranding of the chain as ITT Sheraton to 24 October 1989. Under ITT, the Directory says, Sheraton moved from owning most of its hotels to managing and franchising hotels owned by others.

ITT has not owned the chain since 1998, when, Wikipedia says, Starwood acquired ITT Sheraton; Starwood also owned Westin. Marriott International has owned Sheraton since 2016, when it acquired Starwood, and the brand now sits in the same group as Residence Inn.

Design and documentation.

The hotel names in this group work at many different scales at once. A single brand can be read from a motorway sign at night, from a canopy over a front door, from a lobby wall and from a plastic key card that fits in a wallet, and each of those surfaces asks something different of the same mark. A name that sits comfortably in illuminated letters on a roofline has to survive being printed small on a door hanger or a folded room-service card.

A hotel brand’s identity is also carried by spaces as much as by graphics. Lobbies, corridors, room furnishings, uniforms and printed room collateral are all places where a name, a colour or a typeface can appear, and a hotel that carries a brand name may be built, owned or run by a company other than the one that owns the name. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how the name and its mark have changed over time.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its signs and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A borrowed name, a jingle and a chain-wide sign.

The Sheraton identity began as a piece of signage. The name did not come from a founder, a place or a slogan but from illuminated letters on a Boston roof, already in place when Henderson and Moore bought the building, and they chose to spread that name across their other hotels rather than pay to change the sign.

The name itself carried an older design reference. BU Today reported that the original developers probably took it from Thomas Sheraton, the English furniture designer whose style was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Advertising later gave the brand a sound as well as a sign. Wikipedia says Sheraton introduced a nationwide toll-free reservations number in late 1969, replacing many local numbers, and that a radio jingle singing the digits “Eight-Oh-Oh, Three-Two-Five, Three-Five Three-Five” ran through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Under ITT the company name itself changed form: Wikipedia says the chain was officially rebranded as ITT Sheraton on 24 October 1989, and that in 1992 ITT Sheraton grouped a set of its hotels and Sheraton Towers as the ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection. In April 1995, Wikipedia says, ITT Sheraton introduced Four Points by Sheraton, a mid-range brand that replaced the Sheraton Inns designation on certain hotels.

The Directory also records how the chain’s growth changed what the name was attached to. From the early 1960s Sheraton managed hotels built and owned by others, and from 1962 it franchised the name.

For a design guide, Sheraton shows how a brand can grow from a single piece of existing signage — a name chosen because the letters were already lit — and keep that name through new owners and a new company prefix. Compare it with Marriott, its owner since 2016, and Westin, which shared Starwood ownership with it from 1998. For this guide we use laurel green, brass and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sheraton’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.