Creating Luxury Experiences with Kevin Kennon | Ep71
0:00 / 24:11Luxury Cruising Podcast: Come Explore the World In Style· Listen to Kevin Kennon on air
Award-Winning Architect and Sustainable Design Visionary
Kevin Kennon is an internationally renowned architect with more than 40 years of experience designing landmark cultural, commercial, and hospitality projects around the world. Known for combining design ambition with deep human insight, he brings a humanity-first philosophy to architecture — creating spaces that do more than impress visually; they shape how people feel, connect, recover, and remember an experience.
As Founder and CEO of Beyond Zero DDC Inc., Kevin is leading the development of a new model of luxury hospitality: zero-carbon wilderness resorts designed around intimacy, wellbeing, adventure, and safety. Rather than treating sustainability as a marketing layer, Kevin approaches it as a natural consequence of building responsibly in remote environments — while placing the guest experience at the center of every design decision.
His portfolio includes the 1.5 million square foot Barclays North American Headquarters, the Rodin Museum in Seoul, multiple award-winning Bloomingdale’s stores, and leadership of United Architects, a finalist in the World Trade Center design competition. His work has been featured in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York, and he has received more than 40 international design awards.
Kevin’s expertise spans architecture, adaptive reuse, urban development, hospitality design, and high-level real estate advisory. He is also an expert witness and has lectured at leading institutions including Yale and Columbia, bringing a multidisciplinary perspective to the built environment and the people it serves.
As a podcast guest, Kevin speaks most powerfully about the future of luxury hospitality, the psychology of guest experience, architecture as a tool for wellbeing, and how exceptional design can create places that feel both adventurous and profoundly safe. He is especially compelling for conversations at the intersection of luxury travel, hospitality, design, real estate, and investor-facing development.
Adaptive Reuse as an Investment Strategy: How to judge when an existing building beats new construction on cost, timeline and value
Kevin Kennon has spent 40 years putting buildings up and taking old ones apart, including the conversion of the American Express Building in Tribeca and the rebuild of Macy's Herald Square. Most…
From Practitioner to Principal: What changes when a founder stops taking commissions and starts funding their own projects
After 40 years taking commissions from other people, Kevin Kennon founded Beyond Zero DDC and became the client he used to work for. He argues that the work practitioners are proudest of only happens…
Zero-Carbon Construction Off the Grid: What building in remote places proves about cutting emissions on ordinary sites
Kevin Kennon builds at zero carbon on sites with no power line, no water main and no road, as founder of Beyond Zero DDC and after 40 years on projects as large as the 1.5 million square foot…
POPULARDesigning Hospitality Around Feeling: architecture that supports rest and connection
Kevin argues that hospitality should be designed from the inside out: not around spectacle, but around emotional experience. From elevated walkways and dark-sky observatories to culinary greenhouses…
33+ podcast & stage appearances. Remote or in studio, broadcast-grade audio.
