I managed to upset some people recently by telling the truth in a public forum: When you have a Four Seasons on every block, both consumers and investors alike are going to get bored.

People figured that out with Ritz-Carlton years ago. The brand that once defined American luxury hospitality became a template—predictable, interchangeable, and ultimately sad. And Four Seasons, once the world’s most disciplined hotelier, is inching down the same path.

But this isn’t about brand gossip. It’s about how value is created—and preserved.

The market is full of people chasing scale. More rooms, more flags, more everything. But what buyers are paying for now isn’t size. It’s distinctiveness. It’s the places that couldn’t have been built by committee—the ones where you can feel the owner’s hand in every corner, where the choices make emotional sense before they make financial sense.

That kind of devotion shows. Guests feel it. So do investors. A property that carries its owner’s soul can outperform one that carries a corporate flag, even if the spreadsheets say otherwise.

Because the truth is, what once looked like inefficiency—the extra time, the handmade detail, the refusal to compromise—is exactly what makes these hotels valuable. It’s what gives them resilience, pricing power, and that irreplicable sense of rightness.

And you can tell when you’re in one. How the light falls a certain way onto the stucco walls at four o’clock. How the scent in the corridor drifts in from the garden. And how the sound of porcelain plates on a stone table evokes a quiet sense of belonging. Every detail is alive because someone cared beyond all reason.

The people who build like that rarely talk about EBITDA or brand architecture. They talk about legacy, beauty, and belonging. They think like stewards, not operators.

For years, that kind of care was treated as sentimentality—something noble but financially naïve. Now the market is proving otherwise. Those choices, those “inefficiencies,” are the very reasons these properties command premiums that mass-market luxury never will.

That’s the steward’s dividend: the yield that comes from devotion. And for those who have cared that deeply, the return is finally arriving—with interest, and with grace.