When Furniture Becomes Your Hospitality Strategy

How hotel owners can close the gap between their brand vision and the physical guest experience‍

Design to Help Your Business Grow — Pasley Commercial Interiors Podcast
Season 2026 | Robin Pasley, Host | Guest: Jordan Malara, The Outrider Hotel

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What Does It Really Take to Turn a Hotel Vision Into a Guest Experience?

[Robin Pasley]: Hey Jordan, thanks for joining me today on our podcast, Designed to Help Your Business Grow. I'm Robin Pasley with Pasley Commercial Interiors, and you are Jordan Malara with the Outrider Hotel.

[Jordan Malara]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Robin Pasley]: You're welcome. We're so excited to just learn a little bit more about you and what you guys are up to.

[Jordan Malara]: Yeah, so my name's Jordan Malara. I started in the military, but found myself in the hospitality realm. Right now we are crafting this hotel experience. So you're helping us bring that to life. But at the end of the day, we're hotel owners. We own basically two hotels now, and that's what we do.

[Robin Pasley]: Do you plan to own more?

[Jordan Malara]: Yeah, I think so. I think every time we do something, it's always a balance of what's best for our family and how do we merge that with the desires we have for the future. It's our desire to do more, but we're opening this new one, which is our second one. It's our biggest, it's going to be our best. I think we're going to pause there, regroup, and then figure out where we're going to go from there. Hopefully more hotels.

[Robin Pasley]: Okay, so military to hotel owner — tell us how you got there.

[Jordan Malara]: Yeah. I mean, they just go perfectly together — I don't know what's so confusing about that. It's this story where, when I was in the military, it was what I was supposed to be doing at that time. I really loved my time in the military. But I always had a desire to do more, to do something else, and found myself in real estate. I owned some long-term rentals, owned some Airbnbs, and through that Airbnb experience found that it's fun to serve guests who are really happy about things all the time. You get this boost when they say, "Hey, we loved your place, it was so great, it made our trip phenomenal." I think everyone appreciates receiving some gratitude and appreciation. So I took that and figured out, is hospitality for me? A lot of people that enter the hotel space started at the front desk and worked their way up. We were always talking to guests through our short-term rentals, but had no formal experience in hospitality. Eventually I found I was talking about real estate and hotels way more to my military counterparts than I was doing the job I was supposed to be doing. So I felt this natural pull to dive right into it. I took a lot of the experience from the military and applied it in various ways to hospitality. At the end of the day, it's a completely different industry and we're learning every day.

[Robin Pasley]: Okay, so you have a counterpart who is your partner in this project — is he your partner in the other hospitality project too?

[Jordan Malara]: Yes, in the other hotel, yes.

[Robin Pasley]: And that's Connor.

[Jordan Malara]: Yep.

[Robin Pasley]: And how did you guys meet and decide to do this together?

[Jordan Malara]: It's funny. When I was in college in Oklahoma, I had a friend who grew up in Colorado Springs. He knew my business partner Connor and his wife, and he said, "Hey, I really want you to get to know Connor and Maddie." So it was like a seed was planted. We started going to church together and developed a deeper connection through that. A lot of our friendship centered on a mutual passion for real estate. We kept doing life alongside each other, and there was a lot of trust built throughout that time. When it came time to take on a bigger project, we knew we didn't want to do it alone. When you're going into business with somebody, you want to trust them, you want to make sure they have the same moral values. We were really intentional about that. And it was just this awesome time to say, hey, we do a lot of stuff alongside each other — let's do it together now.

[Robin Pasley]: That's very cool. So the things you've recognized coming out of you in this role — can you trace any of that back to your childhood or your upbringing somewhere in your past?

[Jordan Malara]: There are actually a couple of cool things, and it's really taken reflection. I think as a kid, you just don't appreciate your childhood as much. Then as you grow up, you wonder, why am I the way I am? One core thing that sticks with me is that I come from a line of entrepreneurs, and I never saw it that way for so long. My grandfather owned a hair salon and barbershop — he actually owned seven of them in the city we grew up in. My dad is an optometrist who owned his own practice and grew it from one office to two. And my grandmother owned a florist shop. I didn't see them as business owners when I was young, but they were. I think that really shaped me and encouraged me to figure out what it looks like to own my own business.

[Jordan Malara]: And then when I look at the hospitality aspect, there's an element of serving people. That's all hospitality really is — how do you serve people well? What's the experience? How do they leave feeling?

[Robin Pasley]: And that's really where you and I connected on this project — that piece of how to help people have the right feeling when they walk in the door. What's been the biggest challenge in the last six months?

Is Your Brand Actually Showing Up in Your Space?

[Jordan Malara]: Maybe the largest challenge has been how do we take this fragmented idea that Connor and I have and turn it into what we want it to become? Some people develop a hotel and they have the name, the idea, everything put together — they've dreamed about this forever. In a lot of ways, we've dreamed about this, but not the specifics of it. So a lot of the discovery in the beginning was: what do we actually want of this place? What is meaningful to us? What are the places that we visit when traveling that have really stood out to us? I think that's where it was really important to choose the right partners in the project, because we knew they were going to take these scattered thoughts and put them together and carry out that vision.

[Robin Pasley]: Awesome. So besides us, who are the partners working on this project with you guys?

[Jordan Malara]: You guys, Rain Building for the construction side, and Cognizant Creative for the branding side. I think those are really the three key elements to a lot of these projects.

[Robin Pasley]: Okay, so what gets you out of bed in the morning?

[Jordan Malara]: I go to bed at night often excited about what I get to tackle the next day, which is really just a dream come true. I'm still young, still formulating a lot of my own thoughts. But one thing that sticks out to me is this idea of legacy — how do we develop this legacy for ourselves, for our family? What am I teaching my kids now, and how does that play into who they become? And then there's the really cool physical aspect of legacy. We have this hotel in Manitou Springs, this local community of ours, where we can now say we have this impact, and this is what we own and what we're hoping to create. I'll always say, what we've created is not by our own doing — we believe it's the Lord working through us and that this is his plan for us. So how do we carry that legacy forward?

[Robin Pasley]: That's awesome. I love seeing that thread connected through your family line and how where you are today is because of the legacy you came from. Tell us the name of your hotel and your concept, and what excites you most about this project.

[Jordan Malara]: The hotel is called the Outrider Hotel. Back in the day when people were coming out west and discovering new land, they would send the outrider out ahead of time to scope out the land. To us, that name really spoke to us because it was a chance for us to go out ahead of travelers and the local community in Manitou, scope out the land, and say, okay, yes, we're going to choose to develop here. We're still young as hotel operators, and so this outrider name felt true to us and to the area. We're in the mountain west, and it feeds into the overall feel of the place. It has a sense of place and holds a special meaning to us.

[Jordan Malara]: What we want to create is a place that's upscale and refined, but this isn't a new building — we're taking something existing and bringing new life to it. This building was an eyesore to the local community, had a really bad reputation. It's really cool to be able to take something that was broken and make it something beautiful that people are actually excited about.

[Jordan Malara]: One thing that shaped us a lot is this idea of community and how you build community in a hotel. My wife and I spent about two and a half weeks backpacking in Costa Rica after we got married, and we stayed at a lot of hostels. The one thing about hostels is they're not nice, but the community's awesome. The people you meet are phenomenal. That always stuck with us — we had to sleep under mosquito nets, there were massive spiders in our rooms, but the community was phenomenal. So we really wanted to carry that community experience forward. Not only did we want a nice, safe place for people to stay, but how do we get guests to interact with each other? A lot of it is centered around a really nice outdoor area — get people outside, which is what they're coming to Colorado for — get people sitting around fire pits, sharing stories about what they did that day. It's an open concept where we want people to hang out. I think it really comes down to how company culture breeds that too, so the next step is hiring the right people to help create that experience.

[Robin Pasley]: I really love hearing your perspective on the purpose of the hotel and who you want to attract. We got to work with you on this project, and this one had a reputation and a location surrounded by other buildings you can't control. So a lot of it was — on the budget we have, how do we approach these hurdles? How do we hide that? Or how do we highlight that? We did a lot of that — playing with color, bringing things into the space to brighten it up when the budget didn't allow us to rip everything out and start over. And then using contract furniture to help tell more of your story — that you want people to connect to the earth around them and to all the activities that our beautiful city and the adjacent mountains give them to do. That was really fun. Can you recall anything from our problem-solving that was the most surprising or helpful in the process?

How Does the Right Commercial Interior Design Partner Save a Hotel Project?

[Jordan Malara]: A lot. One thing worth highlighting is what we talked about with our three partners. One thing I think we overlooked on our first hotel was the strategic role that you guys play. If you have a brand, if you build this incredible brand name, and you can have everything documented in a brand book, and then you go right to construction, you've missed a key element — because everything that people feel and touch in a hotel is part of the experience. I think you did a really great job helping us walk through that. This is what you're saying you want to create — now this is actually how you create it. And what you need at that time, going through a project like that, is someone who is equally creative and strategic, and also not going to blow your budget. Because there are ways to solve things, but there isn't unlimited money.

[Robin Pasley]: Right.

[Jordan Malara]: And so there's a way to solve this, but it costs a lot of money. Well, that's not really an option. What's our next option? What we've learned through the process of working specifically with you and Zane is that sometimes you need someone who hasn't seen this issue over and over again, and they can reassure you by saying, "No, this is what we do in this situation." So I could be banging my head against a wall, and then you come in and say, "Oh, we'll just do this." And it's like, yeah, why wouldn't we just do that? That's really where it comes down to bringing in the right people with the specialized knowledge who are going to walk through that project with you. We only have two and a half weeks left, and I should be more nervous than I am because there's a lot to be done — but I'm not, because I believe we chose the right partners. I believe you guys are going to execute. And now we have this amazingly beautiful contract furniture that can actually stand the test of time, so we're not fixing every bed frame every week.

[Robin Pasley]: So that's important. You don't want to be doing that. Okay, so if we're looking for the right people to stay at the Outrider, who fits that framework?

What Kind of Guest Does the Outrider Hotel's Hospitality Interior Design Speak To?

[Jordan Malara]: Our ideal guest is really a younger couple — by younger, I just mean maybe 20 to 40 years old, someone who is adventurous or coming for the area. We don't really believe that anybody is just going to make a trip to Manitou Springs for our hotel. The whole goal was for our hotel to have a sense of place in where it's at and to really resemble the local community. Ideally we're looking at couples or single travelers.

[Robin Pasley]: People who are going to experience all that Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs and the West have to offer. Are you going to connect with local outfitters or people that do climbing and things like that?

[Jordan Malara]: Yeah, we're working on some of those contracts right now. We've partnered with an e-bike company, so guests will be able to book with them — they do e-bikes and Jeep tours. Guests can get a discount through the hotel. And a lot of the products we use inside the hotel we're trying to keep local. The coffee in the lobby is coming from a local coffee shop. We actually have an outrider blend — they made a special blend for us that people can buy and that we bring into the hotel. I'm a big coffee drinker, so that's just a dream come true. We're actively working on building up more of those partnerships because we're focused on people who want to get out and do more things. Being locally focused, we want to point people to other great local businesses.

[Robin Pasley]: Where can people find the Outrider Hotel?

[Jordan Malara]: The best place is on our website, outriderhotel.com. You can find us on various social media platforms as well — Instagram and Facebook, both under Outrider Hotel.

[Robin Pasley]: And when is the opening day?

[Jordan Malara]: May 1st.

[Robin Pasley]: May 1st. So exciting. We're so happy to have gotten to work with you guys on this project. Thanks for being a part of our podcast today, and we look forward to grand opening.

[H.B. Pasley]: Thanks. If you need to create an unforgettable experience, then branded interior design is your secret weapon — because we don't do boring. Designed to help your business grow. Pasley Commercial Interiors.