A coffee-shop meeting in Yakima and a management company.

Westin began in 1930 as Western Hotels, Inc., a Seattle company formed to manage other people’s hotels. The guide to the company’s archives at Washington State University Libraries, which hold the Westin Hotels & Resorts archives assembled by the company archivist J. William Keithan, says the idea was conceived at an informal meeting in Yakima, Washington, between the hoteliers Severt W. Thurston and Frank Dupar. A single management company for all their hotels, they reasoned, would help them get through Depression-era conditions, and they brought in Peter and Adolph Schmidt, who operated hotels in the Puget Sound area.

The International Directory of Company Histories, in its Westin profile, fills in the scene: Dupar and Thurston, competitors who were both in Yakima looking to expand, were seated at different tables in a coffee shop, recognised each other and ended up sitting together. It describes the founders as an unlikely mix — Thurston a former vaudeville acrobat, Dupar a plumber turned plumbing-supply owner, and the Schmidts brewers whose Olympia Brewing Company had been closed by Prohibition. Western Hotels did not own the hotels it ran; the Directory says it signed management agreements with local owners and provided accounting, advertising and referral services in return for a share of each hotel’s receipts.

The company grew outward from Washington State. The WSU guide says Western reached Vancouver, British Columbia, and Portland, Oregon, in 1931, had expanded into Alaska and California by 1941, and later added Montana and Utah. The Directory says Western took over management of the Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco in 1941 and was managing hotels in Guatemala by the end of the 1950s. In 1958, the WSU guide says, the company decided to merge its better-performing properties into a single equity company.

New leaders from inside the company followed the founders. The Directory names Edward E. Carlson, who had started as a page boy at Seattle’s Benjamin Franklin Hotel in 1929 and became Western’s president in 1960, and says the company began building its own hotels in the 1960s.

Western International, UAL, Aoki, Starwood and Marriott.

Growth abroad brought a new name. The WSU guide says the company became Western International Hotels in 1963, and that in the mid-1960s it became publicly held, with shares traded on the American Stock Exchange. In 1970 it merged with United Airlines, continuing as an autonomous, wholly owned subsidiary of UAL Inc. with its management and headquarters still in Seattle; the Directory says Carlson became president and chief executive of UAL, Inc. five months after the merger.

The name Westin came during the UAL years. The Directory dates the change to Westin Hotels to 1981 and to Westin Hotels & Resorts to 1985. English Wikipedia gives the date as 5 January 1981, calls the name a contraction of the words Western International, and says the chain’s Washington Plaza Hotel in Seattle was the first property to be renamed, becoming The Westin Hotel on 1 September 1981.

Ownership changed several times after that. The WSU guide says UAL’s plan to unite Westin, United Airlines, Hertz, Hilton International and other travel businesses under the name Allegis failed, that the Japanese Aoki Corporation bought Westin in 1988, and that Aoki sold it to Starwood Capital Group and Goldman Sachs in November 1994; Wikipedia dates the closing of that sale to May 1995. Starwood took full ownership in 1998, both sources say; it also owned Sheraton.

Marriott International has owned Westin since 2016, when, Wikipedia says, it acquired Starwood Hotels and Resorts. The brand now sits in the same group as Marriott itself and the Ritz-Carlton.

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.

From hidden chain to a name on the soap wrapper.

In its early decades, Western Hotels kept its own name in the background. The Directory says a managers’ meeting in Seattle in 1941 settled on near-autonomy for each hotel, and that Western’s influence was to be downplayed in all publicity so that the hotels would not be seen as units of a chain. The WSU archive guide says the same: each hotel kept its own corporate and financial structure, and the idea of a “chain” was de-emphasised in advertising.

That changed after the war. At a managers’ meeting in Portland in 1946, the Directory says, the company decided to hire an advertising firm, produce an employee handbook and publication, and put its logo on stationery, matchbooks, soap wrappers and other items. The Directory also describes the themed “specialty rooms” of the 1940s and 1950s, cocktail lounges and dining rooms decorated to evoke places and historical periods, with names such as the Matador Room, The Outrigger and the Hitching Post.

Wikipedia credits Carlson with a napkin sketch of a tower topped by a revolving restaurant that became the origin of Seattle’s Space Needle for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, and says the chain managed the restaurant at its top until 1982.

Later changes reached the lobby itself: the Directory says that around 1993 Westin redesigned its front counters to make them less imposing than a traditional check-in desk, and that it trademarked the title “Director of Romance” for its wedding specialists. Wikipedia says Westin began selling its Heavenly Bed mattresses, made by Simmons Bedding Company, to the public in 1999, and later sold Heavenly beds and bedding through Nordstrom from 2005 and Pottery Barn from 2011.

For a design guide, Westin shows how a company that once hid its name behind the names of individual hotels came to print it on every matchbook and soap wrapper, and then shortened it into a single coined word. Compare it with Sheraton, which shared Starwood ownership with it, and Marriott, its owner since 2016. For this guide we use sound slate, sea glass and pillow white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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